The Wind By Night
by Tripwire Alarm
Summary: Perhaps it's his loose tongue, and maybe that's the alcohol and maybe it's stress and the long, long day-week-year-life he's having or maybe it's that bit of Donna coming through just a hair. Or maybe he's lived nine-hundred years not saying anything he really wants to say.
1. Forever (Or Something Like It)

"The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it."

-Marcus Aurelius

**1: Forever (or Something Like It)**

It would have been important to remember that he can't _quite _metabolize alcohol the way he used to, but he's past the point the information would have proved useful.

It had been the better part of an hour (forty seven minutes, sixteen seconds) before Pete Tyler's commissioned car arrived to chisel through the tense silence that had gathered around them on that desolate Norwegian waterfront, the aftermath to an intangible explosion they were all sidestepping, pretending not to hear the ringing in their ears. Rose hadn't had much more to say since, but she hadn't broken down. She'd turned into him for a long, limp-armed embrace, whispering that he hadn't even said goodbye.

Lamely, he'd apologized. She'd nodded. Wiped at her eyes. It didn't seem best to elaborate on the idea that she was focused on goodbye when he was still there, here, with her. Instead, he'd focused on the water, the surface chrome bright with late afternoon sunlight. For most of the almost-hour, he'd watched the foamy swell of the peculiarly high tide, listening to Jackie try to explain to Pete via mobile how they'd managed to arrive back only twelve minutes after leaving while Rose stared down at the sand. It wasn't until after they'd left he'd realized she was looking at _his _footprints. Plimsoll tracks in the damp sand leading back to a heavy square imprint, all of it slowly being effaced by the swelling tide.

It was a silent ride in a newer model Lincoln, decent leg room and black leather seats, fifty-three minutes, thirty nine seconds into Bergen during which he'd thought, strangely, of very little other than an unfamiliar descending exhaustion and being glad that Rose didn't seem outwardly angry, though it went without saying that this had not been her intended final destination nor he her intended Doctor.

The unique experience of being _jealous_, even for a moment, of yourself, no matter how many times as he'd been unwittingly subjected to the phenomenon, never felt any less preposterous.

(_"Can you change back?"_

_"Do you...want me to?")_

Jealousy, by definition, implies at least a separation that perhaps he hasn't been willing to accept himself. He'd felt the same in the TARDIS, out of sorts and slightly headachy, watching himself spit out orders to the team gathered at the console like some kind of bizarre out of body experience. He'd watched himself strutting like a rooster, standing beside Rose while she'd watched him with that radiant smile with only a few curious glances in his own direction and a spare friendly swatch of conversation before landing at the bay inlet.

For maybe the first time, he'd felt properly sorry for Mickey Smith. Also, he'd vaguely wanted to punch himself in the jaw. It was a peculiar feeling, and not half disconcerting: this sudden proclivity toward violence.

(Maybe not so sudden. Violence has a lot of definitions.)

Upon arrival, after the sun had set, Rose had gone quietly upstairs with Jackie to their hotel suite, and once Pete finally arrived (three hours, sixteen minutes, forty-four seconds after arrival), he had set him up proper with a drink despite his insistence that he required nothing of the sort, not offended when he had little to say beyond relating the day's events, everything within the interest of Torchwood and their—he'd surmised—fairly thin concepts of global security. Pete had stayed until long past the grand lobby had emptied out, eventually leaving him with the bottle, a room key, a sympathetic smile and an unsolicited line of advice, "Give her some time."

He hadn't told him that time _is _he's what he's given her, and he can already feel it running out, ticking down. What's probably better advice is that she needs some space. It's just that neither the time nor space she'd prefer to have is not the kind he's able to give her anymore. The other had arrogantly assumed it was only him she'd wanted, and with a remarkable lack of insight, had thought any version would fill that order. It was an oversight he'd have been likely to believed himself if there hadn't been clear evidence to the contrary.

For the record, in his talk with Pete he's left out the details about the destruction of the new Dalek fleet, about genocide, about murder, about how he's gone and done it again. He supposes it's in his genetics, a failure in his initial breeding that made him into the universe's most prolific and reluctant murderer. It was only one of the reasons _the other _would barely look at him. Instinctive knee-jerk hatred of himself and all he is, all he has done, what he would prove over and over despite so much effort otherwise.

(It was just a Moment, distilled in quantum superposition from the modification of the de-mat gun-a moment the paradox machines and the temporal overrides on the bowships couldn't reach, and there was no other choice left but _to use it while he still could_.)

They hated each other, on reflex, the two of him. It made what had happened back on the beach that much uglier, a feeling of abandonment in a volatile cocktail with the misplaced pride of _winning_. The competitive pang he'd felt since the moment they'd first been in the same room had washed away in a sudden, unexpected moment of mixed breath and the soft pull of parted lips, and he'd been too swept up in it to even verify the mournful expression he knew he would find looking back at them with his own face.

In retrospect, he isn't proud of himself for it. He'd thrown everything he had into winning that imaginary competition against himself, victorious only because he'd been able to get out the words he'd only ever said to a purple blouse in the dark wardrobe room, where he'd left it in hopes he'd never look at it again.

He'd won because the other had allowed it, he knew that now. He'd only had to say the words. Certainly, both of him had understood what he'd been trying to give her. Certainly, the thought had occurred to him the same as it had to the him that called the shots-what would be best. But, he'd been afraid, dreading that he was beginning a lifetime of watching her with the _other_, loving her from an untouchable, unwanted distance, watching everything he'd ever wanted just past the range of his reaching fingertips; a custom made hell he'd been intent on smiling through because he was at a loss how else to process it. It was a fear that had receded on the beach only to firmly reblossom in his chest, only slightly modified: he would spend his time here watching her wish he was someone else.

"_He's not you,_" she'd said. "_It's still not right,_" she'd said.

_("John Smith is dead, and you look like him.")_

This new him, he's left to assume, is a supposed knock-off of the genuine article that would go back to the stars with his soul torn in half again, the one with the TARDIS, the one that Rose Tyler loves. And _he'd _handed over the one thing he'd-they'd- desperately, helplessly fixated on for years because he'd known what was best for Rose. Because he thought it was his responsibility to give her what was indeed best. Because it _was _his responsibility. The same way that he would take back Donna's metacrisis-garnered knowledge along with her related memories to keep her from burning out, even when she begged him not to do it the way he knew she would. He had to make it happen because he could compartmentalize, lock everything away, his thoughts and feelings did not get in the way because they could not. Except that sometimes they did. He was getting so old, so sentimental.

On both ends, he'd manipulated her into a better life. With the family she'd always wanted, her potential finally nurtured and taken root. A life...with him, if she wanted it. Whatever that meant.

Donna had told him, later on-over pints on Halifax-Four-what she could recall from that false life in the library. The program reminding her over and over of things she remembered, sidestepping things it wanted her to forget. She'd told him that, for a second, his image had come through. She'd seen him.

And then she'd _forgotten_.

The computer, it had wanted her to placate her, for her to have what humans crave, the desire burned deep by society and evolution-love, children, a house with a fence, watching telly before bed: a tranquil, picture perfect, safe human existence. Something that couldn't exist once the Doctor got his grubby fingerprints all over anybody's life.

And no, he doesn't want to think about that now. About Donna forgetting. It makes him think of Martha and wonder if it would be better if they all could forget. It makes him think of Sarah Jane. And it makes him think of Rose, promising him forever and him greedily pretending he could delay the moment that would make her a liar.

Now he's here, trying to promise her the same. Maybe it's not a surprise she's learned enough not to trust it; not to reach out and take it without hesitation. There's a part of him that doesn't either. Thinks something will materialize from the darkness and take this all away, cancel it out, another day that never happened. In the thrall of descending exhaustion, he nonsensically imagines the other Doctor emerging from the shadow of the hotel lobby, putting a bullet in his single human heart and changing his mind about everything.

He never would. Not even to himself.

He thinks of the roar of the flood, the howl of fire splitting the cold night under the Thames. He thinks of Donna yelling for him in a wilted wedding gown, and the sensation of timelines splitting decisively but not watching where they spiraled off.

No one had gotten what they'd wanted, in those moments on the bleak Norwegian coastline. Rose had wanted him-the other him, the _him he'd been_ until suddenly he wasn't, and hehad likewise wanted Rose. And he_, _the one left over just by a kind of cellular roulette, he hadn't even been sure what he'd been allowed to want. His mind told him everything was his own to control as it had always been, but one look from his other self, the properly Time Lord version he had just _been _only minutes before (doubling over in pain against the TARDIS console, the regeneration energy pulsating in his skull, lightning in his veins, the maddening itch over every centimeter of skin) had told him otherwise. In half a day, he'd been reduced to a mere passenger on his own ship and then handed freedom and imprisonment and the whole world on a silver platter.

A punishment in disguise as a reward in disguise as a punishment.

Certainly, in the short time he'd had to consider what the other would do with him, it hadn't been what he'd been expecting, fearing. Perhaps, given the chance, he'd made his own case with a bit of shameless abandon; saying the words he knew the other would not-could not bring himself to say for the same reason he'd hesitated one second too long to get the words through the transmission the last time. So he'd told her; it was his own version of dropping to his knees and begging her not to leave him there to live out a quasi-human life without the one person that had solidified that desire-given it shape. Bosses and taxes and grocery shopping. Birthdays and rent checks, holiday dinners and sick days and sunburns and lying in bed on rainy mornings. Everything he'd maligned because he could never have it.

("_Why can't I be John Smith? Why can't I stay?_")

_("No one's called John Smith! Come off it!")_

But since leaving the bay, the length and solidity of her silence had cemented his suspicions that she was not sold on his authenticity as much as she'd let on, and that it was the other Doctor that she wanted, despite how utterly nonsensical such a separation between them really was. Even so, she made it clear she thought of them as two, one genuine and the other some kind of novelty.

Nine hundred and five (give-or-take a couple decades) Earth years worth of the most advanced knowledge the multiverse could offer, and here he is, sitting at a bar on a 21st century parallel Earth, just shy of actually drunk, teetering on the edge of something, looking at the dark reflection of his eye in the bottom of a tumbler of bourbon that doesn't taste remotely like bourbon, feeling bizarrely lost and desperately wanting to talk to Donna Noble.

He's _never _lost, time runs through him like blood; now he doesn't even know what time it is, what _day_. Not even sure of the exact year. Not even how long he's been sitting, and even less how many times he'd refilled his glass. When he glances, the image of the bottle flickers from focus. All of this is less to do with any physiological transformation and a lot more to do with being out of sync and not paying attention, but it's still novel, the ability to ignore it all even slightly because he _can_.

He wants to blame the other, which is a fruitless exercise: finger pointing into a mirror. He wants to blame the other for his slow descent back into the frigid bitter monster he had been, before Rose, even if it's not quite true. This offshoot of his consciousness, (one moment his own-as ever-the next downgraded to a supporting role; the fairness and luck of splitting in two notwithstanding) has not drawn the long straw. Or maybe he had. Perhaps he would have a better time deciding the proverbial length of that particular proverbial straw if Rose had spoken more than a mouthful of words to him since they'd both watched the TARDIS dematerialize into the long shadows of the humid Norwegian afternoon.

Rose, who hasn't lashed out as he's expected, maybe wanted. Rose with that weak, uncertain smile he remembers too well. Maybe he's _wanted_ to hear her deny he was himself, for every aspect he's changed. One heart. One life. Part human.

Once he'd even asked a Dalek how it felt, being human. Hybridized. Not long after, he'd thrown his arrogance in the face of death, that terrifying reward he'd thought he might have wanted but was yet to earn, like sleep at the end of a very long day.

(Later, as always, he'd been ashamed of it; his chasing death like it was some sorry reprieve that it wasn't, would possibly never be. He'd looked down at his hands in his bedroom, his wrists, the steady relax-contract of his hearts beating through those veins, reminding himself that the thing he wanted to die wasn't there in that twitch of blood and flesh-but deeper, and much harder to get at.)

He's wanted to know. More and more, centuries passing like epochs, he's wanted to know what it would feel like to be human, despite everything his upbringing had ingrained in his mind. _Time Lord_ mores, mingling and fraternization with lesser species was anathema on its own, much less canonizing them. He's played so long at being this fanciful thing, this hypnotic tangle of persistence, ingenuity and ordinary fragility, that's it's become practically mythological.

Now, part human or no, all he wants is to prove Rose Tyler wrong.

And maybe he'll get his chance, because coming down the carpeted stairs in bare feet, he can hear her. He knows the cadence of her steps, the ghost sound of them walking over the metal grate of his timeship have haunted his thoughts in the silence he desperately tried to fill with words and motion and travelers so he wouldn't have to hear their soft patter over the grated floor of his mind every time he closed his eyes to rest.

He can hear the shift of her clothes over her skin, the sound of her breath, all so familiar from the time they'd delighted and tortured him aboard the TARDIS, first as one man, then relentlessly as another. His flesh had called out for her in a way he could scarcely recall feeling in all his life, and even drowning in bourbon and uncertainty, he feels that echo resounding through him at just her silent approach.

It hadn't been quite that way at first, no. Not quite. It had been gradual, something he'd noticed that inflated in proportion with his adoration of her. It was a curiosity, an inconvenience, a thorn. Then he'd changed, and _it _had changed. He'd looked down at her in that not-snow on Christmas Day; glancing at her while she pointed to the sky with her fingers curled up near her mouth, excitement in her eyes and frozen ash in her hair.

"_Yeah,"_ she'd said, with a tiny nod. _"That way."_

And, stricken with that silent thunderclap, all he could manage was a smile. He'd just said it a minute before. Everything was new.

Because he'd wanted, wanted in a way that felt different than it had before. Wanted to touch her, wanted to feel her, _taste _her with a helpless, terrifying intensity that had him scrambling to distance himself back in those days before eventuality did it for him. Because nothing good could come of it. Because he _couldn't_, and they couldn't, and he had no right and it was wrong, he was so old by comparison and it was better, just so much better for everyone if things hadn't become so entangled and complicated that it became inexorably more painful to lose her when it was time. Because it would be time, there would always be a time. Even if she didn't want to understand it, her vision of forever was so grandiose and young and well-intentioned and _human_, all he could do was be honored that for as much as she could have meant it, she did. But Rose didn't know what forever felt like, feels like. Didn't understand what she was playing at when she used words that implied the length and depth and breadth of eternity, encompassed the entirety of time as it exists, has ever existed, will exist.

It's a little thing he's noticed over centuries of travel in time and space: languages are limited to the concepts their culture of origin thinks itself capable of understanding at any given time. Languages are liquid, they evolve over time, adapt to discoveries and technology and socio-political advancement. Most languages use the word forever to imply the longest length of time they can imagine, which, given the lifespan of most species, isn't much and is often prone to exaggeration.

Forever cannot be promised or mapped or spoken of properly by anyone that isn't like him. Or like he was. There is only one man like that now, sealed across the void, sitting on the jumpseat in the TARDIS in rain soaked clothes, his face buried in his hands, fighting the impulse to sob even though no one is there to hear it.

He feels it. He doesn't know why, but he knows it. That him he used to be, he's lost everything today. Everyone. Every hope he'd held onto, it's all gone. He'll go a little mad, do something monstrous because there will be no one to stop him, and he'll have trouble caring until it's too late.

Too dangerous to be left on his own, indeed.

As cool a reception as he's receiving, he'd never trade now. This is an opportunity for something extraordinary, like the universe has slipped up and gifted him an accidental reprieve; given its favorite scapegoat something breathtaking. He can't quite fit it all in his very impressive brain.

He's here. With Rose, in her forever, or something like it.

His race knew too well the ephemerality of the physical world, even their faces and personalities could change while they lived on, knowing even stars were born and died and they could see it all at once if they'd just fancied a look. There were few true constants in the equation of the corporeal, the singular timepoints, in what is and what will be. It was nothing if not choosing self preservation over his own petty wants that he'd never touched Rose beyond a litany of too-tight, too-long embraces that had winded him all the same when he'd made himself casually release her. There was one evening, he remembers far too well, standing in a TARDIS corridor somewhere between the library and the swimming pool after a long day in 1953, her warm breath worming through the fabric of his shirt and he'd hung on just a bit too long, swallowing back a torrent of words at the soft bump of her lips on his neck. Letting go had felt like being physically wounded and he'd hurried away, sick with shame at how powerfully he'd wanted to put his mouth where it didn't belong. It's a memory he's stashed away for reference in texture and temperature when he's stooped to recreating her in the silent red-tinted dark behind his eyelids, something to keep him company in place of the howling din of his own thoughts.

He'd been too attached, almost from the outset. Far, far too attached, too emotional in a way he had not consciously allowed but fallen prey to all the same. Because she was sanctuary; she was sunshine and open plains under any sky, rainstorms and quasars and spiderwebs and star nurseries a hundred-million light years wide, she was youth and wonderment and a bursting electric pinpoint of infinite potentialities, a white hot spark of impulse and joyful mortality. She was empathy and deep compassion, she was selfishness and want, quick humor and brazen guts, the dichotomy of courage and cowardice, she was the entire human race embodied in a single set of hands and eyes and lips and he'd fallen in love with her with all the grace of a plunging dive off a building and into concrete. He hadn't even the tools to resist it.

She was everything he'd ever admired in nine hundred years with so little sleep to mark off the days, to create darkness between time to section it all off, to make sense of it all. She was a lungful of air after years underwater.

So he'd watched her, held her hand, towed her through streets and fields and corridors. Coveted her, experienced the universe as something beautiful again through her eyes, instead of something cruel and empty; something that only gives to take back. Allowed for an idealized, almost courtly, platonic kind of love and then disgusted himself as he'd degraded it with crude fantasies, base desires that had honestly surprised him in their unapologetic vulgarity; their sweet harmony in profane counterpoint. This imagined ritual of courtly love, desecrated by a carnal shadow that passed through him with regularity like a cold wind, was always accompanied shortly thereafter by the uncomfortable certainty that he'd become depraved in his old age, that he was a complete fool and that he was so very, very far in over his head.

And when he did sleep-_oh_. If he had believed in any Gods, he would have been begging them all for help. For clarity. For _mercy_.

It had been one of the unforgivable imperfections of the Time Lord race, that they still were at the mercy of biology. Of chemicals and tissue, nerve endings, impulses. As long as they were made of bone and blood, as long as they lived with hearts beating and synapses firing, they could not rise above painful solitude and bestial lusts and become the deities they envisioned ruling from their shining world. Their incomprehensible arrogance had made Gallifrey an ember. And then not even that.

Born among the temporal elite of the cosmos with an intellect deep and cavernous as the depth of space, he has seen the rise and fall of great empires, the white-hot death scenes and birth of stars (dwarfs and cepheids, binary systems, pulsars and eventual supergiants) he's skipped along the length of galactic filaments three-hundred-million parsecs long, rode the charged particle bowshock of systems hurtling through the interstellar medium, seen the fires of a true hell where even death lacked any finality, gazed into the maw of the Nightmare Child as it split through the fabric of an entire supercluster. He's seen the end of time and the expiration of matter, watched suns and worlds and civilizations and people born and die and like erosion from water or wind, it has worn over him. He has watched it all-all from the outside, looking in. He is infinitesimal and enormous, subtle and blaring, magnanimous and subversive. All of this that he is, was, has ever been and he'd been helplessly enamoured with a twenty-year-old, 21st century shop girl from South London-and the fiber of his existence brutally admonished him for it.

It was like a quasar falling in love with a firework. The slow burn of eternity mesmerized by a flash of brilliant, gorgeous light. Trying to find metaphors to accentuate the smallness and the hugeness and the out-of-proportion-ness of it all do nothing to make it any less true. Less incredible or foolhardy. He'd not thought himself even capable of feeling so recklessly smitten, not as old and wise and hardhearted as he'd thought he'd become-as, perhaps, he'd _always _thought himself.

_Well_.

His existence is nothing if not increasingly bizarre. Case in point: hotel bar. Norway. Somewhere past two in the morning local time (if he thought very hard about it), the soft crush of carpet under footsoles coming up so slowly behind him.

One frail human life. One chance and only about sixty more Earth-years left, give or take. In a bourbon haze, he can feel the muted clock-tick of his own single heart, counting down the seconds.


	2. The Most Mundane of Things

**2. The Most Mundane of Things**

He half-turns in his seat to see her over his shoulder, mostly just so she'll stop that slow approach, creeping up like he's something unknown. Some kind of predator. That sudden shadow, that flash of want, even just to reach out and touch her is so much harder to ignore now in this new version of himself, the Doctor version ten-point-one. Or it could be the alcohol. Maybe it's the alcohol.

He raises his eyes to the skylights after a moment, ignoring her exhausted shoulder-hunch and the bare arms that she hugs into her body. Ignoring how she pulls her bottom lip into her mouth in his periphery. He can't think of a single thing to say to make anything right or easier or even bearable.

"Imagine," he says to the ceiling. "Imagine for a minute that you're you. Not so hard, you do it every day, that's familiar, isn't it? Day after day, or days in between, you know, and then suddenly something _happens_. Whatever it is, something big. Something takes you out of your head, puts you somewhere new." He gestures blindly with his free hand, keeping his eyes on the vault of the high ceiling, the wooden beams and glass skylights, pulling out syllables through his bottom teeth. Outside, an unhurried kind of rain is running down the domed glass, merging at passive junctions, falling into the dark. "And now as there was once only one of you, there are now two. Imagine that you are you and now, suddenly, you are not the same _you _you were. The you you used to be, the default you, is across the room, and you're something else to everyone but yourself. Nothing is different for you, not your mind, not how you see things, think things, say things, remember things. Nothing about who you are is different, except maybe something inside you is different, something you can't feel without thinking about it."

She's come up beside him by now, listening while he averts his eyes and prattles, maybe drunkenly, maybe not.

"Can you imagine that, Rose? Imagine suddenly there is a competition for the title of _the _Rose Tyler, and you're not winning." He takes a drink rather than look at her. He remembers just how hard it hit her when Doctor version nine-point-zero erupted in marigold light and cooled off a taller, thinner man with better hair, a chirpy gob and a wicked need to put his hands on her just in the way he knew he shouldn't. He'd had to charm her then, prove he was still essentially the same, even if completely different. He wants to tell her he's far more the same now than he was then. He wants to say he's gone through regenerations where more than changed in his physiology than the differences between the two of him now, except maybe it isn't true. He's often joked that he might end up with two heads or eye stalks or gills or six hands, but the truth is (was) that he was all but ensured the same basic design every time, if nothing else, and he would never have lost a heart in the deal. At least he thinks so. It's not something he wants to test. Not that he can, now.

She's looking at him now the same way she did then. Like she wants to understand, but something in her can't. And maybe she will, but then maybe she won't.

She had, however, kissed him. Kissed him so he'd nearly forgotten to breathe, forgot to think, electrified by a profound jolt of euphoria and probably that should embarrass him, that he can be so easily derailed by such a simple, physical act. Maybe he can blame this human-ish body on his part for that, but for her part he can't blame impulse when he'd exploited her most raw vulnerability he could have at the time. Though even if he hadn't, the other still would have left. If perhaps a bit more gracefully instead of turning tail and running back to the TARDIS like the heartsick selfish coward he is (they are). Not that he can blame himself. If the tables were turned, he wouldn't have been able to stand it any better than the other: letting him have everything he wants while he...

Yes, well. In any case, she hasn't answered him. He takes another drink and shrugs miserably.

"I suppose it must be difficult to accept, even after you've seen it. If you've got a bucket of water and you pour it into a different bucket, it's still the same water, isn't it? Even if the new bucket's only got one heart."

She blinks, pulls out the bar stool beside his to sit quietly. "You don't have to explain yourself to me. You didn't..."

"I did. That's the point. Whichever me did it, still _me_." He turns the glass in the light before dropping his gaze and dragging it along the countertop, over a damp cardboard coaster and the rings of condensation where he's forgotten to use it.

"If it was like that, with the bucket, there wouldn't still be the same bucket full of water somewhere else, yeah? And if it's split in two, there's only half the water left."

"But it's still water, is what I meant. What was inside it didn't change. And this bucket's got all his water, thanks." He's botching this explanation, he can tell. After all, he's not explaining regeneration this time, not again.

There's no metaphor, single or otherwise, to explain a biological metacrisis the right way to a human who can't quite be convinced that two of something doesn't make the second any different from the first, at least until the moment they became two. It's a very human sentiment, after all, that there can only be one valid instance of anything without the other being in some way less.

"Starfish." He says suddenly.

She raises her arms up, hands locked on her own shoulders. He makes the mistake of looking up at her; her eyes are bloodshot, rimmed with red. Exactly what he doesn't want to see. "Starfish?"

"Yes. A starfish fragments. An arm breaks off-new starfish grows from the broken arm. Their DNA replicates and replaces what's missing, echinoderm asexual propagation. New starfish, then. Now you have two starfish, made out of the same. Same DNA, exact same everything. Just two. One's not less the same starfish just because it was physically there first."

"And everything one starfish knows, the other knows?" There is just the smallest hint of amusement when she prompts him like that.

"_Well_. Given the intelligence of starfish it's hard to say. A man is the sum of his memories, and I admit my knowledge on the emotional sentience of starfish could be sorely lacking, _but_!-"

Rose holds up her hands, fingers spread into the air, protesting the attempted tangent. He frowns a bit, leans with his elbows on the bar top, catches a hand on the back of his neck.

"It's not such a foreign concept. Starfish. Plant clippings. Things growing out of other things without being exactly new or even different. On a sentient intelligence level, maybe. My people were a bit unique when it comes to identity and propagation." He finishes the drink and, at her resulting silence, pours another. He probably shouldn't, he knows it.

"So," she says, her voice so carefully flat there's nothing to give her away. "You're a starfish. You're a bucket of water." She shakes her head. "Same mind in a new body. Like a cyberman."

"_Not,_" he says pointedly, "like a Cyberman." His eyebrow lifts without his permission and he casts an almost-glare over, not really meaning to. Now that he's looking he's not sure she wasn't joking a bit.

"And all that, it's supposed to make me...what, exactly? Feel better? Stop being angry?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know. I wish you weren't angry."

"I wish you didn't feel like a stranger."

Ouch. Without his consent, a corner of his mouth lifts up, one side of a curtain opening in a smile that doesn't feel good at all, it feels more like prodding an open sore. "You've never felt that way before?"

"Suppose I have." She picks at the countertop. "He said. He said the price of saving everything was you."

"Yep. That was nice of me." He takes a drink, clicks his tongue. "Everything would be just lovely if I hadn't popped up and bloody _saved everything_ when it was going to hell. Bet I didn't think that one through when I said it. Brilliant. Talk too much, that's my problem."

"Tell us a new one, Doctor." She reaches over, fingers grasping, takes the glass from his hand and drinks, which, to his way of thinking, is a rather intimate gesture to make to someone she's just acknowledged as a stranger. She makes that screwed up alcohol face and swallows noisily, looking down into the drink for a long moment before continuing. "He said...you're dangerous."

"Not any more dangerous than _he _is, if you're married to that particular pronoun. If I hadn't been there to do it, _he _would have done, whether _he _likes the idea or not. Or I would have had to, however you look at it, it had to be one of us. If I'd thought I was unstable and dangerous I'd have never left you here with me."

"And I suppose..." she trails off, one hand clasped against the back of her neck, eyes drifting closed in a long, exhausted blink. "The two of you discussed all this?"

"Not a word. It's not as if it's a terribly exciting prospect, a conversation with yourself. Not much to say you don't already know. In all your jumping with that dimension cannon, I bet that's one thing you never ran across. Billions of parallel worlds, Rose. Stacked up on each other, membranes of potentiality. Billions of versions of Rose, even more of me if you've moved around in time. Did you come face to face with another Rose Tyler?"

After a moment she shakes her head, and he reaches, takes the glass back from her fingers. They're warm, they leave negative prints of fog ghosted around where her fingertips have been. What's left of the ice rattles.

"Even if you had, at least you'd know she was different. From another world, different experiences; it's a different life and different memories that make a different person."

"But just a different body doesn't, you mean."

"Should it? Aren't you different now than you were at Canary Wharf? Even from how you were yesterday, this morning when you woke up?" What he doesn't say is that looking at her now feels more and more like looking in an old mirror, seeing a kind of living reflection of himself from before his last regeneration cycle.

("That's me," the Other had said. "Before we met." Of course he'd been talking to Rose, but now he's wondering he hadn't been addressing them both.)

"In my experience, days don't often make a habit of ending much or anything like I expect-but _this_," he nods a little convulsively, raises his eyes up, surveying, tangenting away. "_This_ is, I'm certain, not what you were expecting. _I_ couldn't have dreamed it up if I tried. Hotel Bar. _Norway_. And Rose Tyler, angry at me." He shakes his head a little with his eyes focused on the bar top, eyebrows raised, lips above the rim of the glass, pointedly poised over the faint lip print she left. Maybe he does it on purpose, to remind her. She can't have forgotten she kissed him. She's even thinking about it now, he knows it, because as much as they're talking about him being him and a her that isn't her and starfish and buckets, really, what they're talking about is that she kissed him, chose him whether she knew quite what she was choosing or not, and how that's going to work moving forward if she's regretting that.

Really, if he's honest, this is a lot of the reason why he'd never done it. Fear of something he couldn't take back. He'd never be able to unkiss her if he'd let himself step forward and close that distance that had always screamed to be closed every moment he spent in her proximity. He'd never be able to unconfess anything he let tumble out of his mouth that she may not want to hear, or worse, that she did want to hear. He'd been too possessive of the happiness they'd had-that _he'd _had. Wanting more, risking an alteration to any aspect of it, or just rushing the arrival of that moment when they had to go their separate ways...just the thought of any of it had made him skittish as a rabbit from the start. He'd gone a long time without a companion, before Rose. Spent a long time rethinking the entire idea of them, their function, their importance, the rules of what they were and what they weren't. Then he'd spent every day she'd been with him reminding himself of those things, puzzled that they'd made so much since before he'd met her, and every day since he'd lost her punishing himself for adhering to imaginary rules he'd made up himself and respecting the taboos of a society of ghosts.

"I'm not angry at _you_."

"You are. I didn't say goodbye, or I left you here with me, or I planned this without telling you, no matter what you want to call it, it's me that did what's been making you sit up awake in that hotel room while I'm sitting down here...drinking." He rolls that word out slowly, tasting it for the rare delicacy it is.

"But _you're _not," she begins, then furrows her brow again, shakes her head slowly before starting over, sounding tired. "...why _are _you drinking?"

Another shrug, since he guesses he's not completely sure why. "Seemed like the right thing, an ending to a day like this one. We'll call it an experiment, see how much it takes."

"And," she says softly, "how much does it take, then?"

He takes the bottle in hand and eyes it, thinks back, lifts his eyebrows and enunciates carefully. "A lot."

When he looks up, it's less that she's smiling than that she's just not scowling; not the picture of resigned melancholy she's been. "Rose," he tells her, keeping his eyes away from her because its easier. "It's still me. Honestly, I-if I wasn't, I'd say. You know I'd say."

"I know." She says it so quietly, he wouldn't hear it if everything else wasn't so turned-down. "I _know _you are. Something takes you out of your head, and you end up somewhere new-some_one_ new, but not. You're used to _changing_, but I-Doctor-I don't know what to feel. I feel awful that I'm not happier and worse that I don't feel...worse." She shakes her head again, lifts her eyebrows. "I dunno."

He slides the drink toward her, swallows the words that jump into his mouth, him wanting to fill the silence because its so much more comfortable than listening to her breathe and palpably ache in the spaces in between.

Sighing, she wilts against the bar top, her elbows first, then her head, arms folding over it like closing flower petals, her eyes to the starless ceiling. In the half-dark of the great room, she fights tears not so well that he can't see them catching what little light they can. "And I travelled so far. For so long. Looking for...and it just." With a sudden movement, her head is buried against her forearms. "I worked so hard, is all, and-and I have to remember that I had more reasons for it than just...thinking I could go back."

Rose slowly lifts her head and then the glass, looks into it before drinking. She makes the face again after she swallows, staring down into the liquid with her lips slack. "And what's worse is I haven't even asked if you're alright."

His automatic false response is interrupted by a swell of abject misery she seems to notice in his expression. He doesn't reply, since it's not like she'd actually asked.

"Maybe it's the least of your worries, and, I don't know if it helps," she says softly, "but I'm glad you did it."

He inherits the tumbler, only holding it before seeking out her face against his better judgment. Instinct pushes him to make light of it, derail her with a subject change. Instead, all he can produce is a watery smile.

"It's not something to be glad about. But it needed doing. Always does. And if I'm not wrong, it'll need doing again. Every time. Every time it needs doing again because they make it out, and every time I end up...like this." He can feel her eyes on him, watching his thumb and forefinger absently pinch the lobe of his ear briefly, worrying it before letting go. "Because a mass electrowave system power override switch is really just a big _trigger_." He draws out the last word, letting it drop low in his throat and under his breath. He doesn't look at her.

"Yes," he says, after a long pause, nothing but breath and the almost subliminal sound of rain on glass. "I suppose I am dangerous. And I suppose that hasn't changed from body to body, even if other things have. Coffee instead of tea. Suits, leather coats, cricket whites, scarves, hats, new eyes, new teeth. New _hand_. But every time I've died, changed, everything that's happened to me has come along with that light you saw. Because that's me, Rose. More than any of this, _that's _me. I'm that light, and these bodies, they're just the same as suits, leather coats, scarves, hats, a change of clothes. You can store me in a receptacle-a fob watch, in a storage Matrix. Personalities are just biochemical balances in organic tissue, regulation of gene expression, all amino acids and neutotransmitters, secretins, gastrins, somatostatins, and all of it fired by _energy_. That's what went into that jar when I didn't want to change-energy, Rose. Mine. When I didn't want to change because of how much I couldn't stand for you to look at me again the way you're looking at me _right now_." His voice rises so suddenly at the end she nearly jumps and he rakes a hand over his face and through his hair like it's a handful of weeds he means to rip out, rubs at one eye with an index finger.

"Even though this time you're not looking at someone different and trying to find something familiar. Instead, you're looking at something familiar and trying to find something different." He drains the glass, stares into it. "Life _is _funny."

"I'm not laughing," she whispers, and he's got her attention now, there's no doubt of it. Perhaps it's his loose tongue, and maybe that's the alcohol and maybe it's stress and the long, long day-week-year-life he's having or maybe it's that bit of Donna coming through just a hair. Or maybe he's lived nine-hundred years not saying anything he really wants to say. "And is this you, then, snapping at me, Doctor? Or are you having another difficult regeneration?"

He almost laughs at the prospect of difficult regeneration, the exhaustion that happens when one rebuilds themselves cell by cell into someone new; remembers waking up in strange pajamas in a strange bed, a room smelling of plastic Christmas garland, of cinnamon and wood smoke and with an apple in his dressing gown.

"Chromosome architecture stabilized within minutes of the energy siphon. Six billion base pairs, protein strands and RNA products locked up all proper. The hand had the whole diploid genome map in the somatic DNA, but no catalyst." He stretches out his hand as an exhibit, as though it illustrates anything other than this is the only piece of him she may be willing to accept as genuine. "Then Donna touched it. The energy activated, but since she _touched _it, skin cells, hair follicles, a bit of fingernail, whatever it was, just a touch of human enough that the existing tissue and human DNA create a metacrisis-a recombination, if you prefer-and the energy just rebuilds everything that's missing with the materials and blueprints it's got. And it's my hand, so the rest of me is what's missing, isn't it?" His tongue is on a rampage and he doesn't dare look at her. "So I wake up as though nothing's happened, feels like seconds after I siphoned off the excess energy, but no. Takes a minute to put it all together. All of it. Everything that's happened, even since the moment I transmitted that goodbye to you, maybe long before, all of it led us here. Timelines so twisted up even I couldn't untangle it until we were at the end of the knot. And here we are, at its end. So if you're right finished telling me I'm not me, I've got some drinking to do to pass the time in my retirement."

"I think you've had enough, Doctor."

He nods, a painful smirk sneaking up on him. This isn't going the way he'd pictured. If he'd even pictured anything.

"Why didn't...you ever say it before?"

"Say what?"

"On the beach. What you said to me on the beach."

She's not repeating it, being vague and ambiguous in a way that isn't Rose, and all at once there's a stone where his stomach had once been. Funny, that- how his tongue shuts right up, when it wants. He has to unstick it from his jaw, just to squeeze out his reply, the answer that burns all the way up coming out. "Because the universe would never let me keep you."

He watches her recoil a millimeter, leaning away on her stool to face the emptiness of the low lit hotel lobby, the front desk far across the high polished pine floors, a stone fireplace the size of a grand mausoleum, blazing with gas-fed flames the color of cobalt and copper. She's a profile, sharp shadow and angles, vector curves and fractals of golden hair against firelight. He wants to touch her with a frightful urgency he should have learned to suppress half a millennium ago, and maybe he had and it's simply that Rose Tyler has been the exception to everything he's ever known about himself.

"And because, I just...didn't know how-no-didn't know the _right _way to say it."

"Fairly simple, I thought."

"Is it? Languages are limited to expression of concepts its engineering culture understands. And love_..." _He breathes it out almost absently, but still she turns, at attention. "It seems so small, doesn't it? Encompasses too many things. It's not exactly _unique _to the English language, this watering down of everything until it means almost nothing. People profess to _love _the most mundane of things. Television programs, a football team. Chocolate. A house. Songs. It's just not the right word for what...what I wanted to say. It's still not. It can't-not properly-but, it never can. Even words like _wonder _and _awe _pale in comparison to how they feel. What they really mean."

Like forever, a tiny word for a concept the human brain cannot grasp. Uncountable other temporal ideas no Earth language has a word to remotely describe (not even regeneration is quite the correct word and neither is metacrisis for that matter) but every one of them has got a word for forever. And _love_. Love, an even smaller word that's supposed to describe the most ineffable sensation of concurrent misery and joy he's ever experienced. Synonyms aside, that humans can boil these things down to such small words they accept without question, that seem like _enough_, it makes him in equal parts irritated and envious.

As though love could _ever _be the most mundane of things. As though any part of a life shared, lived being wanted instead of needed could ever be boiled down into words that could ever be enough.

She's smiling now, despite herself, he's certain of it, but still he can't look. He's focused on his hands, gripped around the glass, erasing her fingerprints. Yes, it's a funny old life that he's here at all, split off and settled here in this foreign corner of existence with one chance at everything he may have ever wanted but been afraid to acknowledge, he seems to be intent on mucking up thoroughly.

"Well, how would you say it, then? If anybody knows the right word for it, it's you."

"There aren't any. There aren't enough words in the English language. There aren't enough words, Rose Tyler, in any language."

"Not even your own?"

His own language. Fifteen different self-referencing pronouns, over a hundred tenses and fifty different grammatical phrases, all irregular verbs, and no positive word equivalent for _love _that isn't of a familial variety.

Languages are limited to the concepts its culture understands. But the body, it learns. On a long enough timeline, change is the only constant.

He laughs, and to his ears, it sounds bitter. "Most especially my own."

She's silent now, there's just the babble of the rain and empty space, of breath and the sense of passing time. It's a few minutes before she stands and circles around to where his knees perch off the bar stool, bent tight and cobalt blue in his suit trousers and she nudges between them. She stands between his knees and catches at his face, tilting it up toward hers and she's a masterpiece of human symmetry, looking down at him with red-rimmed bourbon colored eyes and lowered eyelashes, looking at him while the other is far enough away he can nearly ignore for a moment the feeling that he'll always be there at the back of his vast mind if he concentrates on it, and wonders blandly if it is a two-way kind of mirror. A perverse part of him hopes it is.

"I travelled so far," she repeats. "I worked so hard, saw such...I watched as terrible things happened, things I couldn't prevent. Couldn't change. Things...worlds where there weren't even any pieces to help pick up after everything was done. All of it, to find the...and..." Her mouth works silently, he watches it try to make the words; words that will be as immense and heavy as others are worthlessly small. Twisted in the stomach, his single heart thumps hard, blood pressure spiking with every drumbeat and he watches the shivering glisten of tears return and spill over when she blinks, raises her eyebrows with conflicting emotions battling for room in the same expression before it settles inevitably on sorrow.

She doesn't continue. There's no moment to react before she's pulled him toward her, his cheek to her neck with her arms folded around his shoulders, standing while he sits, slumped forward against her with his arms folded tight around her waist; he'd wrap both around her twice if they just could be long enough to do it. She smells fresh of citrusy hotel soap and a spicy mouthwash smell from the bourbon, and he's never been so grateful or so kind of shell-shocked; his mind heavy and saturated like an overfilled sponge. So completely uncertain of anything in the most terrifying and exhilarating way.

Perhaps this, more than anything, is what it is to be human. Barreling headfirst into the fog, certain of nothing, not even the next sunrise, next _breath_. He could be killed by bacteria, toxic gas, asteroids, cholesterol, poison, just one little bullet. The fact that humans even leave their houses, much less throw themselves into the situations they do, knowing their own fragility; it's nothing short of extraordinary.

(He knows it's science, biology, psychology, this evolved positivity bias is essential for survival, but as Time Lords had a near endless supply of time at their disposal, they'd had no need of it, and he is very aware of the realities of his new mortality. It seems a terrible irony that the race entrusted by the cosmos to harbor and govern temporal reality had so much time at their disposal that they'd come not to value it at all.)

It's been less than a week since he was nearly murdered by a group of frenzied ferry passengers. Ten approximate linear Earth days since the Library, since Vashta Nerada and data ghosts and hearing his _name _spoken in his ear by a stranger. Twenty-one days, nineteen hours, thirty-two minutes since he drank arsenic in 1926 and, coincidentally, the last time he slept more than a few minutes in the jump seat or face down on his lab bench.

She's pulling on his hand, stepping back, saying words he can't focus on because they were prefaced with _"Come up to bed"_ and his attention had blinked out. She's towing him toward the stairs, they're leaving the bottle behind and he is feeling in his trouser pocket for that key card Pete left him with his imagination and the alcohol conspiring against him viciously.

He's exhausted enough, entranced by present company and the champagne fizz his blood has turned into after almost a fifth of bourbon and a long embrace, that he hasn't noticed the soft giggle of the rain has stopped. Hasn't noticed the chill in the air, or the slow drift of a heavy wet snow falling against the skylights. Hasn't noticed that-Norway or not-it's _July_.


	3. Dead and Gray and Perfect Blue

**3. Dead and Gray and Perfect Blue**

He sleeps like the dead. It's fascinating in all the ways that it's not just slightly alarming. When he wakes to a dove gray sort of daylight peeking through the drapes and Rose nestled close by-no shoes, no jackets, that was the agreement-he's fairly certain he hasn't shifted even a centimeter. With his eyes open, flicking around the room, he records the specifics of the enclosure, the grumble of a violent-sounding rain on the windowglass, the robotic sigh of the hotel ventilation system, the soft, damp human respiration just to his right.

Any sense of the exact time, queerly, escapes him.

When Rose rolls over, she smiles, just slightly with her hooded eyes and voice soft when she speaks, preserving the fragility of this surreal moment where they've woken up together in the early morning quiet. "Hello."

Vaguely out of focus, she looks like something he's dreamed up. He has had dreams like this. When he speaks, it comes out thin; a little rough. "Hi."

"Did you sleep?" She does a slow double-blink, watching him for his reply. How he's ever managed to find himself in this moment, he's not sure he'll ever quite put it together-trace all the branching seconds over the last years that have linked together to bring him here. He doesn't, has never, believed in luck outside of its relation to chance probability and statistics, but this morning he feels immeasurably lucky.

"Actually, I think I _did_."

"Unusual?"

"_Well_," he begins, but doesn't finish, thinking of the sounds he's accustomed to that are now absent: the subliminal thrum of the TARDIS, the periodic grunt of the tetchy circumlocational date rotor he could hear corridors away. The last time he'd properly slept outside of the ship must have been the days following his last (full) regeneration, at Jackie's old flat in the Powell Estate. That particular instance had been completely outside of the usual, and his control.

He looks at her, her eyes still half-mast, watching him from under her eyelashes with a gaze softer than he's seen on her since their reunion. For a moment she's young and fragile with her playful eyes and burning heart, not a distant, gun toting doppelganger of himself. He's thinking about how he's switched out a hotel bar in Norway for a street corner and grabbing a taxi home at two a.m. for Rose Tyler towing him up a staircase around the same time, but indeed, this is the life he's never had and this is the breathless stasis that is the usual for them, this moment on the edge of waiting for something to happen. And perhaps they'll live the rest of their lives on this narrow cliff because he'll take whatever she wants to give him. It won't stop him from wanting. It hasn't yet.

She blinks against the daylight looking sleepy and small and sinfully beautiful before her brows draw together on her forehead and she rolls back, hugging her arms to her chest and talking to the ceiling. "It's _cold_."

Is it? He can't tell. He's been dreaming of snow and cybermen and hot air balloons. Ridiculous. The bourbon is to blame. It's also to blame for the headache.

_("Jackson, you've got your son. You've got a reason to live."_

"_And you haven't?")_

"Doctor?"

He turns his head toward her, watching across the pale hillscape of the pillows, wanting to touch but he is, as ever, the absolute model of restraint.

"It must be killing you," she says, her face gone carefully impassive once more, perhaps because she's caught him looking introspective. "Being stuck on one planet. One _time_. You'll go mental, I know it, in a week you'll be building a ladder to the moon."

"You know it, do you? I've spent loads of time in one spot without losing even a marble. Two hundred years on Gallifrey alone, doing...what anybody does, I suppose. Years on Earth, in exile, if you want to know. Nineteen-seventies. Great cars, horrible music. And has it never occurred to you, out of all of time and space, how inordinately many times I end up in London, England? There are entire years I can't visit again in that city for fear of crossing my personal timeline. That _alone-_"

Rose reaches out, bridges the gap between them with her hand on his face, the soft pad of her thumb against his bottom lip. Amazing, that, it shuts him up like an off switch. "You'll resent it. How could you possibly be happy...?"

What she means is, you'll resent _me_. She just doesn't say it; doesn't have to. "I'd just like to hear you try and tell me why I won't be."

She thinks a moment, the frill of her undone hair backlit by the cresting daylight. If someone could catch sunshine in a bottle, they could put her picture on the label. He would buy every shop out of stock.

"Because...all _this_. I dunno. Sleeping in a hotel, even. It's just not you."

She shifts, blinks at him and _oh_, how he wants to touch. He grips a handful of the bedcover in his fist, made restless by his ever-tiresome temperance, his cage of imagined propriety turned overnight to one of boundaries. "There is more to me than just getting into trouble on every planet I walk onto, Rose Tyler. Besides," he sniffs, crossing his arms and his ankles. "I can get into trouble here just as easily."

That squeezes a breathy laugh from her. With resolve, she presses her lips together in a line. Because this is a time to be serious, she must think.

"Even if you're trying to talk me out of it, not much I can do about it now. I've split off. Ended up in a new body after that aborted regeneration, and here I am, dumped myself off, trusting myself to make due." He hesitates, rolling the next word off his tongue distastefully, one eyebrow raising of its own volition. "_He_ took the burden of the Time Lords with him, when he left. Back to the TARDIS because what else is there? Just another goodbye, as if it wasn't hard enough the first time."

For all the progress they've made in the minutes since waking, and the thirty or so they'd spent talking in the dark the night before until Rose had grown quiet beside him, now she looks sad for the mention of the other Doctor, across the void, and maybe it's a mistake to give her the idea that he's alone. He doesn't want to explain how he knows.

"There's Donna," she says softly. Mostly for herself. She seems to miss the shadow that passes over him at the thought of her, the Doctor-Donna, the closest he's had to a relative in lifetimes, unquestionably gone now in every sense of the word that matters. Just another farewell that he hadn't the privilege of making.

("_Donna Noble has been saved._")

"I'm here," he says, by way of distraction; his forte. "I'm _going _to be here. Unless you tell me otherwise...I was hoping I could be here with you..." Now he's stooped back to this passive aggressive not-begging. His nonchalant discussion of his recent and massive reality-shift and his casual offer of ambiguous togetherness as though his knees hadn't been ready to give out from under him with the weight of the possibility that she might turn away and leave him here alone.

"If I want?"

When the affirmation sticks in his throat, dies on his tongue, he only gives a vague nod. It's humid, he can feel his clothes clinging to him in a kind of off putting way that feels uncomfortably like being strangled in extreme slow motion.

"What do _you_ want?"

He doesn't know why the question knocks him quite so off-balance, but all he can do is mimic her; parrot the word back as though he's never heard it in his life. "...want?"

"Yeah, want. All this time, don't think I've ever heard you say anything about what _you_ want."

Maybe it wasn't sadness he'd seen there after all; it sounded more like anger. And probably there was something a bit off about him that he was happy to hear it, anger directed at him for behavior not exclusive to this version of himself, if that's even what she intends. Regardless, his mouth hangs on the beginning pronoun, framed around his unformed response.

Only then does he recall the sound of the rain hammering on the windows, the static hiss of a downpour only minutes before, dwindled now to nothing.

The room is shadow punctured with pink, a sunrise the color of candy floss slipping under the edges of the heavy red brocade drapery, ribbons of light spooling out over the low pile carpet, one stretching long and thin over the foot of the bed, sliding over Rose's bare ankles. He's only just noticed it when it's suddenly gone. All of it. Blinked out into dimness as though none of it was ever there.

Maybe it wasn't. He's still tired. Exhausted. Rose's eyes are closed again and when she speaks, it's decidedly with the sadness she'd lacked before. "Would he have left you? If I wasn't there..."

"We didn't draw lots if that's what you're asking. Staying was not an option, not for me."

"Right then. He just made the decision for all of us." It's far too early in the morning for anyone to sound so bitter, but he doesn't say so.

"Taste of my own medicine, I suppose. The politics of splitting yourself into two isn't exactly discriminating. And either way, I wouldn't fancy the idea of keeping company with myself for that long. I'd say I got the better deal of the two of me."

She says nothing for a long moment, thinking so loudly he can practically hear it. She shifts on the mattress, rolling to face him fully. "Must be odd, for you. Do you feel different? Like you told me once. The turn of the earth. Falling through space?"

He thinks, closes his eyes, grateful for reprieve from her earlier line of interrogation, though he's reluctant to reply. Instead he deflects. "It's not something I'd notice constantly-more like...if you pay close attention, you can feel your heartbeat. Or how something involuntary can turn voluntary, like breathing, if you think about it you can take control of it."

At the mention of a heartbeat, her hand reaches, lies flat on his chest to feel the soft pulse there twitching under her palm. It's just her hand on his chest, nothing special, nothing she hasn't done before-but given the setting, it feels intimate enough he can feel heat creeping up from under his shirt collar. He elaborates, "That just...feels a bit...lopsided."

"It must," she says and it's an almost whisper. Again, she sounds sad. He hates it. "And...time?"

"Bit different, the flow rate here, feels...kind of jumpy." He shakes his head, flicking his eyes at her and shifting tone. "But even the human brain perceives time, at least in its primary linear dimensional constructs the way most living things do, so you've likely already noticed that. Biochemistry can speed up that perceived flow, slow it down to sort through a surplus of stimulus."

It's not quite what she was asking, he knows that. Answering a question without answering it is an art form he's spent the better part of a millennium perfecting but it's difficult to think about it with her hand reaching for his face. The pad of her thumb presses his bottom lip and slides away to be replaced with her mouth, soft and pressing, dry and hesitant and barely-there in little more than a shared breath, paper meeting paper before she's already drawn back against her pillow, face flushed like she's been out in the cold. His single heart rattles in its bone cage like it wants out.

It was little more than a touch of lips, but his thoughts are scattered like leaves hit with a sharp gust of wind. This is just the sort of stimulus that can slow time down, even for him.

There's a familiar, instinctive panic rising in him and he swallows it back while she watches him expectantly. He's inundated by a memory of waking from attempted sleep—years back— soaked in frigid sweat, from another obscure fantasy involving Rose, of tangled limbs and a blissful sensation of heat and sliding.

It's a memory of finding Rose sitting alone in the ship galley, staring into a cold cup of English breakfast with her eyes as red and vacant as they'd looked just the night before at the lobby bar. It's a memory of desperation: his heartsick drive to bring back her smile following the unexpected stop in a world where her father was a billionaire and zeppelins filled the sky and where Mickey had chosen to stay. She'd been less than happy since the debacle on the spaceship with the time windows and France, and that was his own doing; his still-new impetuousness and his laser sharp focus shrunk down to a single point: repairing a timeline in furious disarray from its original and proper form. And maybe he'd done it, just a little, because of Sarah Jane, who had lived a lonely life, ruined on a banal human existence and human relationships, so entrenched in his lifestyle that she'd struggled with bitterness and resentment for years. Maybe he'd done it, just a little, to show Rose he wasn't worth that. To save her from it. From _him_. Before he ruined her too.

(Before he admitted that maybe he wanted to ruin her.)

When it came to France-he'd known he'd find a way back. One way or the other. He always _did_, eventually; he had the utmost confidence in that. But the instant the option had become available, he'd run off to seal a path back to Rose so quickly he'd barely spared a thought for Reinette or the inconsistently differing time flow. He'd left her with the rest of her short lifetime waiting for him to come back to show her that star. He'd fought so hard to save her from an altered timeline and a gruesome death, endangering Rose (and Mickey) in the process, then swanned off and left her to die waiting and lonely-a fate of which he harbored an unequivocal terror. The reality of it, admittedly, it had hit him a bit hard in the afterward, his new tendency to abandon others in an enthusiastic rush. Reinette's letter, cementing her as dead in his own timestream, had only made it worse in that he couldn't even rectify the mistake at his leisure. Perhaps he'd been a bit distant afterward, humbled by the unwanted reminder of the tragically brief lifespan of a human and all that implied for him. As though the visit with Sarah Jane hadn't been enough. The universe conspiring to flog him with what he already knew: that he was playing at something impossible.

They'd never discussed it, hardly at all. Not Pete Tyler or Sarah Jane or Reinette, and it would be the same with Mickey. Instead, with Rose despondent at the galley counter with her cold tea and red eyes, he'd practically tap-danced around her, promised her the moon and Elvis and old New York-and instead given her the Wire and half a day without a face because he'd gotten caught up in the whirlwind of events and left her. Again.

With his arms around her that evening in the corridor, bidding her a nice rest with her still dressed in pink heels that made her taller than usual, he'd held her too tight and too long. The gentle bump of her lips on his throat when she'd turned her head had made his blood feel too thick for even two hearts to pump properly. And the feeling was of absolute, numbing panic. He'd retreated like an abused dog, plowing a hand painfully through his carefully coiffed hair because he was a half-moment away from doing something _inexcusable_ and he'd been increasingly certain she would let him.

Despite how clear it was becoming that in every sense, he couldn't be trusted with her.

It's that same panic he'd gotten almost accustomed to after that, it welled up and receded in her presence like ocean tide, and it's the same panic he's forcing back now. The tip of her tongue runs over her top lip and it raises the hair on the back of his neck. "Doctor," she says, sounding uncertain and throaty. "What do _you _want?"

She's handed him an invitation, one with red ink and exclamation points and he's short of breath, cataloging every soul-twisting daydream his mind has ever conjured in place of acting out, remembering every lonely mournful hour of her absence, the painful yearning for the most simple things: the sound of her voice, the warmth of her fingers braided with his, the feeling of her eyes on him after he'd looked away.

His hands find her, possessed of their own agenda, towing her forward and into him. She says nothing, only waits, and he whispers his reply into the hollow of her mouth, "Well. I've just come around on that ladder to the moon."

The moments seem to lose their continuity, time moving too fast and standing still with the gentle push of her lips against his, whispering dry kisses melting progressively into another and another, less tentative each time until it's all dropped into heart-pounding, open-mouthed slow motion all with hands clutching clothes convulsively in white knuckled fists. He reaches to catch the back of her head, finding his fingers fascinated by the slip of her hair and the curve of her skull in his palm, her hands crawling over his shoulder blades and down the slope of his back, touching freely and he drinks it in because his body is a desert and her fingertips are rain.

_Rain_. It's raining again, he can hear it, blasting against the windows. It rumbles low in the spaces between their breaths, the wet sound of their connected mouths, the hush of fabric moving against fabric. She insinuates a thigh between his, tilts her hips. The bare sole of her foot slides, toes hooking the cuff of his trouser leg and dragging upward along the back of his calf in a move so blithely erotic it makes him feel in an instant more stupefied than he had after hours of drinking. Her tongue curls at the ridge of his teeth and he swallows a shuddering sigh at the buried animal instinct that moves his body against hers with every wrong, bad, beautiful perversion his suffering filthy mind has ever harbored about her body and her mouth and the sound of her imagined outcries ringing through the dark empty canyons of his intellect.

And something is going to happen. His muscles are tensing up. His muscles always tense up before something happens. They are folded around each other on top of the duvet (no jackets, no shoes, that was the agreement), flesh and blood origami and her skin is burning hot, a tiny sound made at the back of her throat drowned out by a peal of thunder so earsplitting that Rose starts violently, gasps against his mouth, shock driving a wedge between them; cold water on melting ferocity, and his head throbs in response.

Looking down on her flushed face, the pinched and shadowed expression on it, there is a irresistible urge to apologize profusely. Maybe there's no call for it, but it rushes out anyway, a flood of remorse because she's been so undecided on him and he's so confoundedly _sorry _that he's somehow found himself in this hell where he's not quite what she wants.

"I'm sorry," he tells her in a rush of breath. "Rose, I'm sorry-really."

Her head has twisted toward the drapery on the far wall, her face and attention diverted long enough he can draw back and will away the reflexive shame that's boiling up, louder in his ears than the storm whipping in off the sea and slamming into Bergen.

"_Oh_," she says, and her lips are so pink. She swallows hard, shifts backward from him. A moment passes before the strange silence that has grown over his mind, like a kind of moss or cobweb, clears away and thoughts shiver back into focus. His first thought is if the other could see through the weak remaining telepathic window, even across the void, he would want him to have caught a glimpse of the last two minutes. It's a spiteful thing, but he's lived more than nine hundred years and can't recall a single moment in all that time that had felt quite _like that_. So out of control and gorgeous.

He's not sure if he wants to share it or wave it in the other's face like a victory flag. Which of the two will likely depend on how upset she is about it. Is she upset? He thinks she might be upset.

His second thought, more vaguely, is the rain. It's barreling into the building, the wind a mechanical groan like bending metal that sounds nearly as frustrated as he's found himself. One of them is trembling; he's embarrassingly certain it's him. She's turned back and opened her mouth to reply, before another bellow of thunder shakes the walls and the teeth in their skulls, then shrinks to silence so abruptly that glass in the mounted picture frames is still shivering audibly in the sudden vacuum of sound, almost as though it hadn't a chance to finish. There's no echo.

The downpour, as well, has stopped. Blinking, he remembers the pink sunrise strung translucent and glowing over Rose's bare feet, creeping in through a gap in the drapes. It had been there. Then it hadn't.

The Doctor watches her watching his face carefully, the question taking slow form on his features.

Eyes pried wide enough he can see the whites all around her irises, she draws herself up on her elbows while he climbs up, taking a moment sitting on the bedside to pull a hand through his sleep flattened hair. He breathes slowly, in and out. Cooling off. Willing away a strange vertigo that reaches up through the floor and _pulls_.

"You...alright?"

He hauls himself to his feet and closes the distance to the slider in a few strides, not pausing before throwing back the drapery hard and clenching his fist against an the withering nausea that grips him at what is waiting for his eyes behind that barrier of heavy embroidered brocade. He forgets to answer her, because he'd been utterly brilliant a minute before and now that he's seen outside, he's drifting rather quickly toward _not okay_ and is forced to reconsider exactly how lucky he is-they are-to be here.

The sky is a tangled riot of motion and surreal stillness; frayed wires of frozen lightning stretch across dark swells of cloud that flicker to clear blue, distorted shapes of zeppelins extend from themselves in spiderwebs of jerking motion in every direction. It's daybreak, storming violently and clear as a bell and buried in snow. The sky is filled with vehicles and all their flightpaths and also abandoned in the weather, black as midnight, burning with stars, a sunrise tangerine and salmon pink, dead and gray and perfect blue. All of it shifting, twitching in time, trembling on the edges of his vision like a camera winking out of focus, a reel of film slipping off its track.

He's seeing all of it at once, everything that can be in relation to this moment, everything that _is_; all available realities in superposition. Potentiality. Visibly, with his eyes, which is not how he's ever perceived timelines, and all of this without even _trying_. He wants to blame his ill-advised binge drinking the night before or some kind of strange metacrisis-hangover or maybe even the dizzy arousal he's still cycling out. But it's not, it can't be, but for the life of him, he has no other ideas of why he can see tangible potentials like a _Meanwhile_; why this branch universe now looks like a world in the thrall of macroscopic quantum phenomena. A locked state of material absurdity.

What did that metacrisis do? (Why hadn't he seen it the day before?)

He breathes in slowly, fighting a tremor that wants to take over at the unsettling familiarity. He thinks of Arcadia, of Elysium, the insurrection of the Skaro Degradations. He thinks of things that happened and never happened and turns his eyes to Rose as she's coming up behind him, one hand on his bare arm with her eyebrows pushing together on her forehead. She squeezes her eyes shut and reopens them, squints before closing them again, presses the pads of her fingers against the lids before trying again. Her breath has grown short and fast, and he can't blame her because it means she _can see it _all the same as he does; the way _no one_ should see. It wrings his stomach like a wet towel inside him, throat burning with either bile or some kind of nervous, sick laugh accumulating at the back of his tongue like dew gathering on a leaf.

("_That's what I see," _he remembers saying to her once in a douse of gold light and fear and overwhelming affection that is nothing when viewed in the light of what he feels now, looking down at her face as it tries to decide on an expression. "_All the time._")

(And doesn't it drive you mad?)


	4. Liminality

**4: Liminality**

She watches his face, it usually says more than he does.

It's a peculiar kind of daylight that's coming in through the sliding door, quicksilver bright and shifting, sunrise to grey. He's staring out the glass in that vacant, half-blinking way of his, eyes popping side to side, brows perched up while his brain computes. His lips hang open around a thus-far unspoken word, the first in a likely flood.

She's seen this shadow play on his face so many times; it's surreal to see it again in this setting. Her mouth's gone dry and stiff, her throat hollow, everything scarcely holding together at all. She's paper-maché, held up with glue and wires. She feels that empty, that strange. Like the wind could pick up and she'd just blow away.

It's not a question that he's the same man. She knows that much. She remembers every little mannerism, she's dreamed of them all, cobbled him together in her head out of these tiny pieces in the dark of night, something to bear her up when she's felt the most like she's sinking. She's stood in the shower stall, water hot as she can stand it and beating down on the crown of her head, recalling details so she won't forget them: the impatient way he stirs his tea when it's too hot, the way a smile crawls over his face in slow motion from the bottom up, the back-lit brown of his eyes—the color of a root beer sweating cold in the summer sun. The indescribable smell of his shirt collar under her nose: something like French toast and cold air.

Saying he felt like a stranger was a lie, but at the time, the idea made her feel better. Like she didn't know him, that he wasn't to blame for anything. He was abandoned the same as she was. The truth is that he feels so much the same that it's just that much worse, that much more confusing, and it felt better to pretend she knew how she felt about anything.

Denial was stage one, she knew that from her therapy. The stages of grief or loss or whatever it was. The Elisabeth Somethingorother scale. Pete had insisted on her seeing a Torchwood counselor, sometime after the long, strained drive home in that old Jeep with all her luggage still in the boot and her heart still scattered in pieces like driftwood on that beach in Norway. Because, Pete had said, it was like a death. It was loss, plain and simple. Unexpected and sudden and devastating. And after the bane that Lumic had brought on this world-he knew all about that.

She misses stage one. It hadn't lasted very long, she'd moved onto anger in record time. ("You can't," he said. _You can't_.) Her bargaining phase had lasted, however, long enough that she'd bargained her way into a parade of alternate universes when the walls had thinned out. Now she's back to pretending, or half-pretending, or maybe she just can't quite put a finger on any of it. If she's angry or sad or happy, if she hates or loves or even knows him.

She's been more than a bit hot and cold. She knows that too. The last thing she wants is to be cruel to him. It's not as though this all isn't difficult enough for everyone.

But here she is, fresh off rubbing herself up against him in bed like she's only ever thought about with no second-thought about her morning breath or bad hair and no matter how much and how long she'd wanted it, falling into it now feels unsettlingly like betrayal; of who or of what, that's less clear. She'll be the first to admit it's a stupid thing to feel, and not a little because he'd turned away and left without even a proper goodbye, without anything, and he didn't bloody deserve her would-be fidelity to start. (Except he did. _Of course_ he did.)

But more because she can't rightly call herself abandoned by someone who is, by all accounts, standing in front of her. She can't mourn someone who is in the same room. He's managed to take even that away.

She'd learned to accept his regeneration, though even now trying to reconcile two men so wildly different and yet so specifically the same still felt like she'd blinked and missed something.

(She's since grown used to the feeling: now her entire life feels a bit like that.)

She'd accepted that he'd lost a hand and grew another; it was one of the most concrete, tangible ways he'd ever proved truly alien, but it was simple enough. He'd lost a hand, and then he grew a new hand. He'd once changed into a different person right in front of her. After all of this, it hasn't been that difficult to reconcile the idea that his hand had simply grown a new body and the reality of the Doctor standing here in this Bergen hotel room. Time Lords and their unique biology. The starfish of the universe.

Without a doubt, she's seen stranger things. Nonetheless, one moment she's ready to accept him with the ease that feels natural; the next there's a stinging guilt. The feeling that she's allowing him to tell her _she can't _all over again.

Because she _can, _she _can_, but she's worried that maybe she doesn't want to anymore.

Staring outside, her mind is flooded, overwhelmed, and she stares, everything spiraling through her head fast as a sneeze: The Doctor and the hand and the Elisabeth Whatever scale, then she forgets. All she can see is chaos made of shifting light and shapes and dizzying things her eyes can't understand all at once. What she can see is a problem screaming for action, and even this mustbe more cut and dry than the war waging under her skin. Here there can be an answer, nothing subjective, something she can solve. She's already fumbling with the Torchwood wrist-mount she's left on top of the heap of her blue jacket, twisting knobs with fingers that feel too big.

"_Control_!"

The reply is only a burst of static, the high whine of bending frequencies, a grinding cacophony that rattles her eyes in her head, makes her skin feel too tight before she switches the device off again and strangles the urge to hurl it into the wall, crams it into her back pocket instead. The mission had been reported as completed; no one would be in the booth now. Not this early. They wouldn't even be waiting for a signal.

"Rose."

She's standing in her bare feet, yelling into a Torchwood communicator as though the Doctor isn't standing a meter away with his mouth twisted, head pitched to one side. Perhaps, if he'd been the other Doctor...

(The other Doctor who would never have kissed her like this one just had, immediate apology or not.)

(_Stop it_.)

"_Rose_."

"What is this?" She points vaguely in the direction of the window, tucking her hair behind her ears on both sides with a snap of her hands. It's her professional calm, cultivated over years, and she pulls it on like a fencing mask. "Doctor. What is _that_, out there?"

"It's..." he starts, voice dropped low enough in his throat that it's evident he's unsure how to continue. He turns, hands in pockets now.

"Doctor," she says woodenly, and he frowns just at the tone. "What the _hell_'ve you done now?"

He visibly recoils, hooks a hand on the back of his neck, eyebrows rocketing upward. "_What_! I've scarcely been out of your sight, how could I have-"

"Because you're _you_, Doctor," she almost chokes on it but it's the truth, and she knows it no matter how difficult it is to reconcile with what she knows. "Nothing was this way any other day I've been here for three years; you're here _hours_ and the whole thing's gone unraveled!"

"It's not unraveled; it's…practically the opposite, if you want to be more accurate. It's _raveled_," he accentuates this word exactly in a way she remembers, the vowels through his teeth and it does strange things to her, makes her want to laugh and makes her eyes burn. "All of it-everything together."

"You're saying it's a coincidence, then."

"_Well_. No."

"This has something to do with us. Because we're here and..." she comes up beside him to stare outside, the bright twitching net of zeppelin flight paths as though they were all places at once, a bright jumble like a coil of Christmas lights strung through the air with the scorched wasteland below also verdant and overgrown and paved over, bright with sunshine, slick with urban rain, buried in snow. "The atmosphere was heating up. Dad..._Pete_ told me, about how before I came here, they were saying the polar ice caps were melting. Global temperatures going up, and Torchwood knew it was the breach, leaking radiation from the Void."

"Thermodynamic radiation. Every jump punched another hole in the dimensional membrane. This world was already damaged by loss of equilibrium at quantum level, it's likely the damage would be exponential if the breach were to be opened again." He plows a hand over his face, looking grim. Pale.

"But why wasn't it like this _right away_, when we got here? Why right now? What's changed?"

"Not so much changed. This is reality as it always exists, just not how it's regularly perceived. Reality and time as seen properly, all probable moments occurring simultaneously in respect to the established preceding measures of time infinitely smaller than seconds."

She turns to him, the shifting daylight on her face and her folded arms when she huffs at him. "It _has _changed. Things weren't this way yesterday, not even a few hours ago. Not for me, at least. When we went to sleep, we would have noticed if things were this way, would've seen it outside, wouldn't we? And why is it only outside?"

"Went to sleep...?"

"You just said a few minutes ago that you did." The idea that he may not remember feels like ice water trickling down the ravine of her spine. "Don't you-"

"Went to sleep," the Doctor repeats, a gleam of mania flashes over his face, eyes wide. "Rose. We went to _sleep_."

She watches as he reaches up, plowing his hair back from his face with one hand, turning away from the window to pace a few steps toward the wall before wheeling back. "We went to sleep. We weren't watching. Weren't _observing_. Measurement of a system requires an observer; electrons can't collapse their wave functions without an observer choosing the most probable sequential outcomes in linear time. Everything possible from one moment to another is available, and exists simultaneously, but can't be perceived by most things without specific circumstances. This moment here, with us, you and me in this hotel room in Bergen-having _this_ conversation-has always existed. Will always exist. Moments in time cemented in their prime condensate are coordinates, everything else is this," he gestures with an upturned palm toward the window, then shrugs in what is likely to be the most inappropriate display of casual uncertainty ever demonstrated. "Liminality. Between-time."

He's rambling and she just stares. Part of her is trying to listen, honestly listen, despite how well she knows it's impossible to ride his train of thought without falling off spectacularly.

"There is a branch reality, likewise, for all relative variables. Parallel worlds created by the existence of potential wave functions, each creating their own branches in all their similarities and variations and it's all so _fragile_. One change, one word in the wrong place..."

"Can interrupt the causal nexus," she finishes, and the stunned expression he makes is something she wishes she could frame on a wall. He doesn't even sputter, just silences entirely, lips still open to speak. Despite the situation, she feels a smile tug at one corner of her mouth like an irresistible fishhook and flatlines her lips to counter it. "Bound to learn _something _working on a transdimensional travel device." She slows the technical term down as she enunciates it, just out of habit. "The consequences of interference and related precautions would be the top of that list, I should think. Afraid my physics classes didn't cover much of the quantum stuff. Or 'any' quantum stuff, more like."

"Y...yes," he says, with an almost imperceptible nod, taking a large breath before his eyes slingshot away with a distinct air of discomfort, looking back to the mess outside the glass of the sliding door.

"Is that what this is? Have we...did we start something that's only now taking effect? Like...I dunno, like Donna said. Dimensional retroclosure?"

"Could be. The reality bomb never leaked through the dimensional membrane, the electromagnetic force isn't negated by a flood of zed neutrinos with half-integer spin, mass holds shape, the stars don't go out. Other forces aren't affected but then perhaps they are, the instability of neutrinos notwithstanding-" With little fanfare, he turns again and whips open the glass door, slipping outside onto the balcony and into the barreling rain that shifts into snow, the dark that becomes light and everything else at once. On reflex, she calls out, her hands snapping into fists.

"_Doctor_!"

She watches him lean out, squinting and bowing forward against the slanting curtain of water, far to one side, then the other, gripping the metal railing where a thousand people before him have clutched the paint off. "It's not unreasonable to think these are some kind of reversal effects," he calls back in over his already soaked shoulder. "Retroactive from the bomb's failure and the Earth's involvement in the planet engine."

He's back inside so fast she barely registers his movement, bounding inside and snapping the slider shut behind him, reaching down for the hem of his shirt, not even pausing before stripping it over his head. He sweeps into the washroom where she hears him work the sink and emerge a minute later with his wet hair raked back from his face, gripping a white hotel hand towel and bounding back to the window in his water mottled blue trousers and bare feet as if it's all the most normal thing in the world.

"But this Earth," she says evenly, coolly, but her eyes are on his skin and doesn't she just hate herself a little for registering the little round mole just between the points of his shoulder blades while he reaches out to move the drapery further back; for cataloging the constellations of freckles along the ridge of his spine. "It wasn't moved. Was it?"

"No," then he pauses, turns, teeth visible in what only looks like a smile. "No, it wasn't. It was our Earth. _Ours _taken into the Medusa Cascade, into the rift, one second out of sync with the prime fabric..."

She's following now, a familiar exhilaration swelling up uncontrollably under her tight composure. It's not the right reaction, she knows that. "It wasn't ever switched back. Resynced?"

"The rest of the planets were trans-matted back with the magnetron, resynced to their original coordinates in time and space but Earth, oh, of _course_," he growls the last word, bringing up a hand and gesturing at her with an open palm and flexed fingers like he's holding an invisible grapefruit, eyes wide with the light of sunrise sparking the color of rosewood on the fringe of his eyelashes and all by himself, he's a kind of performance art that she can't look away from no matter how much she wants to. "Earth had to be physically moved. By us, by the TARDIS, and he never..."

His mania goes flat in such a sudden moment it's like hitting a brick wall at top speed, his voice growing small. "He never brought the TARDIS out of liminal time. Everyone else was sent back to points on that Earth, time consistencies, they'd never see it. But, no. Not us. Travelling temporally might be enough to collapse matter wave functions for mass being _observed_ but..."

Rose lets out a breath she doesn't realize she's been holding, her hands knotted together. "So the world can't hold together because we stopped looking at it?"

He catches at the back of his neck, cranes his head back with his face toward the ceiling, eyes squeezed shut.

"Why could that happen, Doctor, why wouldn't we automatically resync when the TARDIS materialized?"

"This world runs ahead, there was an existing time asynchronicity. Has to be that. We've talked about it before. Millions of cybermen crossing at once, bending the void. Think of like..." He paces a few steps at a time like something caged at a zoo, looking restless. "The wind blowing a sailboat, pushing the movement ahead with force, that's what happened with the time synchronicity between the two; one's forced forward by a vast quantity of mass. So the TARDIS punches through the membrane in the way it shouldn't with the link to the Eye of Harmony working blindly through the timelock, parallel coordinates can't be computed reliably via the TARDIS' organic block transfer computations. The entry is already shaky, damaging an already stressed membrane, the bosons aren't fully manifested, collapsed out of the wave function properly. Then we fell asleep..."

She doesn't say anything. He's talking to himself mostly anyway. He can't think she knows half of what he's said, no matter how she might try. And she's always prided herself on trying.

"It's us," he says haltingly. "It's not here. Not void radiation or global heating, any of that. Everything here is just as it always was. _We're_ what's wrong."

"Doctor," she intones, but doesn't finish. His mania is in full swing; there's nothing he loves more than a good disaster except perhaps abating one.

"_We've_ slipped back into liminality, you and I. We were never fully harmonic with the resonance here because of the particle decay. I felt it the second we stepped out; just thought it was the new body. Something jumpy, kind of twitchy. I dunno." He rubs a hand over his face again, crossing back to the window to stare out. "We could be held down in the system when we were being measured, even if it was just us observing each other, or _ourselves_. Others lost sight of us, and then we fell asleep. Lost our _own_ ability to play observer for our own mass. Without the observer effect, we've fallen to the lowest quantum state available, and probability density has scattered around us."

"And you know this, how?" She lifts her chin in a single upward nod, watching his face do all the things it does and doing her best to stay neutral about it. "You see this out there and just now all of that makes sense to you? None of it even came to mind before now?"

"I...no?" He seems confused. She'd often challenged his methods, occasionally his morality, but never his theories or how they'd conveniently create themselves when he required them. "How could I've-"

"Why did you apologize?"

Well. Now he's confused, that's clear. There's a part of her that feels miserably sorry for him, the same part that immediately regrets everything she's throwing at him all out of order and not at all what matters most now. His eyes flick to the window, then the wall, as though a conversation transcript is written there he can refer back to and see where they went wrong. She watches his mouth slowly make the "w" sound long before it actually comes out. "When did-"

"Just now, well not _now_, five minutes ago," she points to the bed with its crumpled duvet cover and head-dented pillows. "You kissed me and then apologized like you'd done something wrong."

Certainly, now is one of the times his face is writing a novel while his tongue has forgotten spoken language entirely. His is the expression of a child being asked to explain why he's lied about breaking something.

"Isn't it?" he asks, so softly she barely registers before he rephrases. "Was it wrong?"

"You don't think I wanted it." This doesn't come out as a question at all.

When he speaks, it's so small and uncertain, for a moment, it's like she doesn't know him after all. "I don't have any idea what you want, Rose. None, absolutely none."

"Well, yesterday, both of you thought it would be a good idea to just dump us off here because you certainly thought you knew what I wanted then."

She's immediately sorry. She wants to reach out into the air and grab her words before they reach him, stuff them back down her throat. But sound travels faster than her regret, and with a stricken look, he picks his shirt up from the armchair's backing where he'd dropped it. He snaps out the wrinkles and pulls it back over his head, looking everywhere but her face.

It's the same kind of look her mother had avoided looking at her with, in those first days back after the daylong drive home through Bergen to London via Belgium, Denmark, Germany, no place she'd ever been in her own world anyway. Thirteen-hundred miles of mostly silence and smothered coughs, radio in a tangle of foreign vowels and static, crackling fast food wrappers in the back seat of Pete's jeep, the perpetual squint of a ten-hour headache.

For months afterward, every voicemail Jackie left on her phone ended with _I love you _instead of any kind of goodbye. Often it was a reminder to eat, to call later. Every time, at the end, Rose had pressed three to save the message, instead of deleting it. Just because. Maybe, suddenly, out of nowhere one day, it would be the only way she'd ever hear her mother's voice again. (The way maybe she'd never hear his.)

She still has all of them, digitally immortalized the way ancient people carved things into stone to keep them forever, because it was an unfortunate side effect of her planned future that the only part of Jackie that could come along with her was her voicemails. She'd sat on brick walls and grassy hillsides in twenty different universes while the cannon's heatsync recharged for twenty minutes, listening to her mother reminding her to eat. Saying _I love you_. Not saying goodbye.

Then pressing three to save it.

Because maybe saying I love you instead of goodbye was always better, but she'd been cheated out of both of them once. Except that now she was ignoring the _I love you_ she'd been given and was fixating on the goodbye she hadn't. Maybe she'd never work out exactlywhy she was so angry.

"Are we stuck like this?" Her tangent back to the matter at hand snaps his head back to look at her so fast, he'll have whiplash later.

She's being irrational. It comes with the territory. Her sleep cycle is still recovering, she hasn't eaten well in a week and it's less than 72 hours since she'd sat in a refrigerated room at U.N.I.T. over the drowned body of yet another version of this same man with lips ghostly blue and hair still wet like this-Doctor's is now.

(She'd kissed his cheek. It was cold as kissing marble.)

Grief counseling be damned, she'd be at some version of the bargaining stage forever. Even now, she was making excuses to be unhappy. Remembering things that happened and didn't happen to justify her swelling and ebbing anger.

Rarely had she ever argued with the Doctor who had this face, but even now she watches him swallow a sharper comment to reply with an even objectivity, keeping his tone as light as it's ever been. "We...we need to pull ourselves back into sync with the resonant frequency of matter in this universe. Neither of us are made from building blocks that originate in this reality, our particle resonance is bound to have a natural degree of dissonance that's contributed to the phenomenon. We're not so far out that the density is infinite. It _wants _to decide on rain out there, the light is most changeable because photons have integer spin-opposite of neutrinos, like I said-and the intrinsic particle spin is always opposite the linear momentum. If we can _modify _our own mass waves via supersymmetrical..."

"Jesus," she snaps. "Stop it. There's no reason to confuse me on purpose."

His throat bobs in a tight swallow. It's almost as though he counts to three before he speaks again. "I wouldn't-"

"Why did you _drown_?"

She's not sure if any version of the Doctor has ever looked so openly frustrated. Maybe it's just that he's half-soaked, he's just standing there looking so deceptively normal while he's rattling off the kind of Gatling-gun-science that almost sounds like total nonsense the same as he would have always done. He looks like a tall, skinny bloke in his mid-thirties with wet dark hair and bare feet and a rain-spotted shirt, and even if he's talking about particle spin and matter resonance, there's nothing about him that looks like a nine-hundred year old Time Lord that's seen the width of eternity who's split himself in half and offered to spend what's left of his life with her in the most ambiguous almost-proposal she's ever heard.

All he says is a soft repeat of what she's accused him of doing, as though he'd done it on purpose. "Drown?"

"You _drowned_. In Donna's pocket universe, where she never met you, where London was destroyed, you drowned when the flood barrier under the Thames collapsed. Fighting the Racnoss. You drowned them all, and then you couldn't get out. Donna's world-it was in ruins because you _died_. And the TARDIS was left over, just sitting. _Dying_. Like you said in your Emergency recording, like you said I should let it. At the Gamestation, you remember? Satellite Five?"

"I remember, Rose." He says it slowly, eyes downcast in a kind of mild forbearance that only _looks_ like patience.

"Well?" God, the last thing she wants now is to cry. The last thing she wants to show him is hysteria, if it's not already too late. She's come so far, cast off that old Rose that takes no for an answer, that she can't, shouldn't. That doormat Rose that Mickey left at home to watch matches at the pub, the one that Jimmy Stone dumped flat on her face. She's launched across a hundred worlds, marched battlefields, sat for hours describing the concept of void stuff and nanogenes and Dalekanium-polycarbide supermetal to Torchwood scientists. She's seen the end of the world and the prosperity of a new Earth, she's danced on the deck of a spaceship in the middle of the London blitz in 1941 and met Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria, she's fallen in love with the same man as two different people and she's lived a life in a foreign universe, but her voice cracks, buckles like a bridge under too much weight, as though _this _is the thing that's just too much.

She paws at her face, wiping tears and mascara, pressing the heel of her hands against the globes of her eyes until the darkness behind them erupts in what looks like stars. In all the time she'd spent in this universe, crying had come at the strangest intervals. At a desk in Torchwood Three, in the middle of a training field test, reading a textbook sometime past midnight, twice randomly in a locked zeppelin bathroom for nothing more than the familiar subliminal hum of the engines. Once the flight attendant had knocked on the door, asking her to return to her seat. Jackie had told her, later on, the flight attendant was the nosy type, and she'd probably heard sounds-thought she was joining the mile high club in the restroom stall. Rose hadn't asked how she'd come to the conclusion or even had the idea because frankly-

"Oh my _God_."

She says it before he can even reply to her earlier question, whatever kind of answer she really could have expected. He's only just looked up when the words leap out of her mouth, cracking in the air between them while he stares, looking withdrawn and helpless, a bit angry and so distractingly beautiful that she wants to look away. He blinks in a bright ribbon of morning sunlight, and she doesn't pay attention because she can't. Instead, she shakes her head a little while she talks, trying to quell her panic with action. "We're what's wrong, you said. We're out of sync, we fell asleep and we went out of sync or probability or into that...between time...? And my mum? She was with us, Doctor. What about my _mum_?"

And it's true, his face is all she ever needs to see to know the truth of things. She can't remember if it's always been the case or not. He's dumbstruck a second, as though waiting for some kind of great sonic boom following something soundless that has passed overhead. Jackie isn't something that had entered his mind until now, and another delayed shape of a word is forming on his mouth before he snaps into motion, never even getting a syllable out before they're fumbling with the chain-lock and deadbolt. They're throwing open the door, barreling into the dim hallways littered with the spectral co-existence of a thousand realities, two things out of place and running, tethered to each other by a shared grip damp with rainwater and anxious human sweat.


	5. Smoke of an Old War

**5: Smoke of an Old War**

He runs, but he's thinking about superconductivity. About latent heat and the Meissner effect. Bose-Einstein condensates and blackbody radiation. About the humid warmth of Rose Tyler's hand gripping his mid-stride for the first time in what feels like a good century only not really.

He has a headache that could crack stone.

He runs, and he's focused, but he's not. All things considered, reasons not to feel deliriously happy would be in short supply if not for the standout detail that Rose is beside herself, which is probably the worst metaphor for anything he's thought up in a long time.

No, not beside herself. Anything that implies two of someone only makes things worse inside his aching head. Hell. Just _two _of anything should be the least of his worries with a profusion of uncertainty hanging in the air around him.

The hotel corridors are a disorienting mess of light and sound flickering, changing, fading. Webs of arms and legs that might well be _people _appear and vanish, stretching and blurring along their potential pathways. Everything with the wobble of uncertainty, multiple states existing, cancelling out, reforming. There are sconces along the corridor walls, art deco fans made of amber glass that are both shining and shattered, studded along the ivory brocade wallpaper that is satiny and newly pasted, peeled and worn, scorched, torn, ripped away to wood framing and drywall, crawling with mold and wrist-thick vines. The carpet is plush and burned and matted, littered with leaves brought in through the blown out windows. Outside there is a flicker of gray sky, dry lightning through chasms in the walls that are there only if he's not really looking; whole worlds living in periphery. Then there is the wobble, the dizzying shift like they're living in a world of wet paint, and they run, and it's all as if it was any day in any hotel, nothing out of the ordinary save a man and woman in bare feet running as though the terror of the world is behind them.

The scorched black hull of the burned out version of the hotel corridor is exactly what it feels like inside his skull.

His cranium is pulsating, robbing him of clarity. Every strike his heels make against the carpet send a shock up his spine to the big cellular library of his brain. It's the feeling of a nail being hammered into a wall, the throb of slow war drums. His heart gallops in his ears and his throat burns and isn't this body just rubbish. They round a corner, nearly plunge down a broken shaft that isn't really there, and Rose swings to catch herself on him, her cheek against his collarbone with her face wet enough with streaming tears to stick and he hates it. He hates this, all of it, and his thoroughly brilliant morning has turned incontrovertibly sour.

They find Jackie Tyler curled into a fetal ball near a stairwell exit, her back pressed into the corner of the hallway with her mascara tracking dark ribbons down her face, sitting opposite the open door to the suite. She cries out when she sees Rose, and a quick as that, fast as a sneeze, his hand is empty and Rose is sprinting ahead.

Her family. This was what he'd wanted for her. He'd sent her away, roped that transporter over her neck because her family was leaving and one day, he knew, she would regret not following. The Doctor specializes in saving others the same kind of remorse that haunts him. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, a cycle he's been caught in almost longer than he can recall anymore, because saving others from a plague of their own bitterness has only ever brought him more of it.

(Because, in that _Moment_, he hadn't had the luxury to chose family or duty or loyalty or anything else. There wasn't a choice to be made, if he could even pretend to know what he'd have chosen if he even could. There was just a Great Key and an ignition trigger, a certainty of perpetual violence and ten million Dalek cruisers.)

It doesn't make it sting less, though, this standing suddenly alone, like being left bobbing in a black ocean. It's likely t-minus ten seconds before Jackie is railing him with her arms folded tight and her voice pitched so high dogs would be barking if any are within earshot. He's counting ten, nine-

But Jackie doesn't even look at him. She wraps herself around Rose in a dearth of sound, shoulders drawing up and dropping in jerking sobs. From his position, he can make out a gnarled semblance of the word _nightmare_. Rose rubs her shoulder, the timbre of her voice low enough all he can hear is the resonance, and he's drifting in that dark ocean. Abandoned with a splinter in his chest and a certainty that his brain is going to liquefy and run out of his nose. With one hand, he reaches to catch at the wall, which is solid enough here when he's looking directly at it. His peripheral vision is reeling.

Down the tilting hallway, Jackie's shoulders pull up-they drop, drop, drop. She's really crying now, big raindrop tears that somehow manage to look louder than the storm that's bellowing outside. It all sounds like breath, something big and wet and breathing like the walls are alive, a kind of liquid rush like a heartbeat in an ultrasound, or maybe it's just the tumbling crash of his own erratic pulse that feels strange and unpleasant in his own chest.

He's counting eight, seven-

He just needs to breathe; he'll figure this out. Always does. A couple minutes reprieve from Rose's scrutiny so he can think, and it would all be so much easier without the shock of pain just at the base of his skull, everything inside him feeling white hot and hammered out of iron. That's the wall at his back, and he's sliding down in search of equilibrium, something to root himself to, to grip and hang on as everything starts to tilt under him.

Fast as a muscle twitch, the world's gone askew, everything's a reflection from a warped carnival mirror. Rose and Jackie at the end of the hallway look so far, almost translucent, their legs spider-long and curving, bending unnaturally, their voices lost in the roar of blood and rain and the grinding churn of everything moving toward chaos.

Hands to his head, hair still wet under his clutching fingers, he's counting six, five-

It's not a hangover. Seconds before, his hand anchored to Rose's, he'd been fine. Headachy, certainly, it had hit him hard once they'd left the general stability of their hotel room, its walls inexplicably anchored more soundly around them than this. Upon waking, his attention had been utterly monopolized by Rose, but even then he'd taken quick note that his innate sense of moving time was tomb-silent, a howling hole left in his consciousness. He'd had (still has) utterly no concept of the time, not even the remotest sense of it being winter or summer or morning or night, like waking groggy from a long afternoon nap and mistaking dusk for dawn, except it's more like waking in February and expecting August.

Like a void ship-no atomic mass, no electromagnetic field. Something with utterly no presence. It's how time feels: nonexistent. The soulless ticking of that vast-primordial clock buried in his instincts has gone disquietingly silent as though time is just an idea, something pretend; something he's been making up his entire life. A delusion of which he's woken up to find himself cured.

This conglomerates in his stomach, withering nausea flattening him to the floor, the high-pile carpet brand new and scorched and littered with phantom detritus. How he's feeling is _diminished_. How he's feeling is smaller and smaller.

It's all so obvious right now, how a body works. Burning fuel, creating energy, heat, his muscles cramping and pulling to bend his limbs, the squeeze-relax of his pitiful single heart forcing blood through his veins, oxygen pulling into his lungs that feel so tight and so small. How a skeleton is just something that tissue of the ground. How flesh is just meat, how ideas and knowledge and love are just chemical reactions and electrical impulses.

And he's counting four, three-

His body's coming apart, every organ and cell betraying him. His brain turning into soup, a headache upgraded into a warzone, it's the feeling of his skull being split with a pickaxe, everything so hot and blinding that his flesh is melting off his bones like candle wax. He wants to call out, make a sound, to form a word, _any damn word_, but only manages an inarticulate groan.

The world is long gone. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Here he'd been thinking the universe had slipped up and dropped a gift in his lap, and now he's dying alone with not even enough time for his life to flash before his eyes. Instead, all that comes to mind is a memory of not so long before, lying on the cold floor of a hospital on Earth's single bone-white moon, just shy of disappointed that Martha Jones had managed to resuscitate him.

(He's not counting anymore.)

No, there are other memories, faces, not with any reason to their order. Donna. Romana. Ace. Irving. Sarah Jane. Grace. Susan. Rose.

"_Doctor_!" the word swims up out of the dark, a fish surfacing from a murky lake. The fish has Rose's face, with her eyes hazy, everything about her that used to be pink-lips, the wet rims of her eyes-turned violet, everything double-exposure like bad film. The moment her hands are on him, pressing and warm, the nausea lifts like fog, there is oxygen and he can breathe again.

"What's the matter with him?" Jackie's strained voice finds his ears; he's too dizzy to look up. Eyes shut, he sucks air in and out, mouth breathing.

Maybe it's just like this, being part-human, but there's no word that comes to mind out of a massive vocabulary eight-billion-languages deep to describe just how pathetic he feels, sweating and shivering and Rose petting his hair like a sick child.

"Doctor," Rose prompts, sounding patient and kind and _concerned_. Apparently it's something she can turn on like a switch; she'd been snapping at him only a few minutes before. "What's wrong, tell me what to do."

"I'm fine," he says, muffled against her shoulder, and he is. He's fine, the vertigo is subsiding, the nausea ebbing away as though it was never there. The headache recedes only slightly, but he can see out from under it again, smell the powdery candy-orange scent of Rose's soap, the salt from her skin, a kind of waxy-sweet smell of maybe body lotion or hair conditioner. Almonds. Cherries. Something grounding and real, something that reminds him vaguely of breakfast pastries, something that makes his galloping heart begin to calm.

"I felt sick," Jackie is saying, voice wobbly and gummed up from her crying. "This morning, first thing. I woke up, and I was sick, on the ground just like that. First I was thinking, not this again-"

"Mum, please."

"Well, I _dunno_-is he normally dropping down sick like that? There was that once, I know, on Christmas, but apart from that-"

"How should _I_ know?" Those words have sharp edges. He wants to correct her that she damn well should know, thank you very much, Rose Tyler, but instead he swallows back a disconcerting surge of saliva which hints ominously that his body is planning on throwing up the absolutely nothing he's managed to feed it apart from bourbon. It doesn't take a genius to work out why he feels like this. The rapid onset had thrown him rather substantially for a loop is all.

"I'm fine," he says again, steeling himself before firmly pushing back, hefting himself up with help from the wall. "Really. Fine. I don't know what happened." He swallows back the burning in his throat, taking measured, long breaths while Rose's hands land lightly on his shoulders like nervous birds. "Jackie, have you seen Pete?"

Her eyes are pink, housed in swollen skin smudged gray with yesterday's cosmetics. "Aren't you going to tell me what's happening?"

"Jackie-"

"I don't _know _who or _what _I've seen," she bites into that last word, drawing it out, her enunciation suffering from all the strain. "I woke up and he'd gone, but he wasn't-I could hear him. Heard the shower running, bathroom mirrors all fogged up like, but he's...not. And _it's_ not, and...then I looked out the window. I just went a little mad. I got out of the room, and-" her voice snags up coming out of her throat, it catches and tears, chin dimpling under the effort not to dissolve into more tears. "Whatever's happening, Doctor, tell me you can_ fix it_."

"I promise," The Doctor reaches for her shoulders, low and a somehow bit more narrow than he remembers. "I'm working on it. Think of it like, oh I dunno, you know those old television sets. 1950's, 60's-you had those rabbit ear tuners to fetch the signal out of the air, yeah? Bend them around to clear up the signal, until the picture was clear."

Jackie nods slowly. Rose is no doubt thinking of old cathode-ray tellies for sale at only five quid, Mr. Magpie and fourteen hours without a face and maybe that frightening moment in the corridor afterward with his arms around her, when he'd nearly done something to her but even now he's not certain what.

(That's a familiar line, he'd fed it to himself regularly in the past. _Yeah? Get her in bed with you. Show her just how much you really don't know._)

Rose is watching him closely during his vacant-eyed pause, those lips from a French perfume advert in a fashion magazine hanging slightly open, the pearl ridge of her teeth behind. They're a bit puckered, dry. She licks them and he watches more intently than he wants, there's a pain in his chest that echoes in his skull like a reply. All at once, there it is: the shame reflex. He turns his eyes somewhere safer. As though this is the time for any of this.

"Sometimes, though, you know, the tuning would go south," he continues, focusing, "You'd be getting more than one channel at once, interference, they'd kind of _bleed _over each other, multiple programmes on all at once?"

Buttermilk sallow, Jackie Tyler nods.

"That's it, Jackie, what's going on. Just...multiple realities instead of television channels. And _we're_ the broken tuner. We're seeing everything as it is in every version of this particular causal nexus that's relative to us."

"But..." she sputters, "What for?" What she doesn't ask is _why us_. Because she knows. She knows, it's because of the Doctor, because of him, somehow, one way or another, it's always because of him. It's a feeling he's so tired of having to ignore.

He pulls in a long breath. "It's hard to know for sure. But when the Earth was moved, it was taken out of time sync, the same as all the planets. They hid them in the Medusa Cascade, all of it taken a second out of sync with ordinary chronology to hide the matter resonance from detection. You weren't there when...maybe you didn't know. Either way, the magnetron broke, we had to move the Earth back physically. But it was never resynced. A body so large will do it on its own eventually, time flux will account for the gravity," he's speaking quickly enough it's certain Jackie's barely hearing a word, it's all rushing out, water from a sluice gate. He brings up a hand, pushes his thumb and forefinger against his eyes, shakes his head.

"Doesn't matter. The point is, we, everyone on the TARDIS, they went back to that same Earth. Their synchronicity will reassert itself with the rest of the Earth. But us, Jackie, our bodies, our actual _physical bodies_. When we came here, we were being observed, our mass was given shape because something in this world knew it was here, even if it was just us, watching each other, or just being aware of ourselves."

Jackie doesn't say anything. Her face doesn't even change. It's unsettling.

"Then we fell asleep. In that state, you aren't observing reality, matter, not anything. You don't interact with spacetime in any capacity when you can't observe it, it exists in multiple states. But _us_. Nothing in this reality can observe us while we're asynchronous with it, maybe because we're not recognized as having originated here, we didn't naturally resync with the particle resonance, so-"

"Doctor," she interrupts, mouth opening to deliver that invective he'd been counting down earlier, just a bit late. He expects fury and instead gets a plea thick with unshed tears. "I need to see my son. My husband! I...we can't be..._trapped_ between _channels_!"

"And you won't be. You won't be, I _promise_. We need to be calibrated, think of it that way and leave it to me. But I don't have any equipment, not even my screwdriver. I'll need-"

Behind her mother, Rose is digging in her pocket, withdrawing her wrist-mount communicator with an almost ardent flourish. Differentiating between her painstakingly crafted professional resolve and actual enthusiasm is becoming difficult, and he's only been awake twenty minutes. "The cannon," she says, pursing her lips a moment, maybe that's her tongue going over her teeth. "I still have the jump-disk, in my jacket. Mum, you must have yours too. If I can ring control-"

From the communicator speaker, there's a blast of grinding static. On reflex, the Doctor grabs at his own skull, one eye squeezing shut against the bone-piercing screech. Jackie's palms fly to her ears.

Rose tries again, twists knobs while shaking her head at the device. "This could transmit through dimensional walls before, even after the Earth was moved. So we were already out of sync and I could still talk to Torchwood. Why wouldn't it still work?"

"If I could modify the RF bandwidth sweep-"

Her eyebrows jump. "...but no screwdriver?"

"Yes, but I didn't get out of there with empty pockets, either. I _have _gotten along without one before, if you want to know." He doesn't mean to sound petulant. He feels a little petulant. Maybe it's just the headache. He's been through worse than this. He's certain he has.

"Then-" For the first time, really, he's noticing that her face is not quite the same as before. Until now, he's been so caught up in the idea that he gets to look at it again, that it's there, in front of him. But it is-different-just slightly. Maybe it's the expression, the spareness of her once easy smile, the missing trace of laughter pinching the corners of her eyes, tugging on the edges of her mouth. The remaining soft edges of innocence have been knocked off; during her time here, she's made herself into something hard, something sharp.

"_Is that what you did to her?_" Donna asks on a streetfront in his memory, watching Martha run back across the street toward the assembled U.N.I.T. team. "_Made her a soldier?_"

("_You keep insisting you're not a soldier, but look at you..._")

Probably it goes without saying, he's not quite how she remembers either. On a long enough timeline, the only constant is change.

Then she smiles, just a bit, and she's the same again, the same doe-eyed, bottle blonde Rose, perfume-ad lips and fingernails chewed short. Rose who simultaneously made him feel both sanctified and dirty; who gave him more peace with little touches of her hands and open-mouthed laughter than she had when she'd ended the Time War with a breath of life. Rose who'd promised a forever she didn't have and built a dimension cannon to chase back the darkness, because somewhere along the way she had become someone who didn't just let things happen to her while she sat and watched.

Different and the same all at once. It's not that it's an unfamiliar concept. He should know it better than most.

"Dimension cannon," he says aloud, sudden and sharp, and the wind outside responds. It moans and claws at the walls (except maybe it doesn't) and Rose wrinkles her forehead at him.

"I literally just said that a minute ago."

"I know-" He shakes his head, then regrets it. "Rose, the cannon, the actual control base, where is it?"

"Under Torchwood, at Canary Wharf, third sub-basement level with water access."

"What? Why not Cardiff?" It's less than ideal, but then, being in Norway makes anything but Norway less than ideal for what he has in mind.

"It has better access to a water inlet, is why. It's built in a reactor-casing, the heat-syncs are cooled by recirculated river water. It runs hot, because of the amount of energy it creates during the discharge," she pulls her bottom lip into her mouth, gives a one-shouldered shrug, eyes flicking toward her bare feet. She always sounds a bit mumbly when she's explaining anything scientific; like she's certain she's got it wrong even when she hasn't. That, at least, is exactly the same. So is the pride he feels when she even tries. "Nearly went into meltdown first time we tested it. Even the jump-disks have to cool and recharge between jumps."

"Meltdown," And oh, he feels slapped in the face by that word and everything it implies. His tongue suddenly feels like wood. Heavy and foreign in his mouth. "It's nuclear?"

"_Well_," she demurs familiarly, and it coaxes out an involuntary smile from her that he now has no impulse to return. "No. It has it's own inertial fission engine..."

"Honestly, why _not _Cardiff? Rift energy would have been far more efficient, to say nothing of safety-"

"There is no rift. Not here, not in this world. If there is, it's not given itself away, never been opened enough to be detectable. The Gelth have never been to this Earth, there's nothing there, not even a Torchwood branch."

He nods, feeling no less startled by this revelation than by the concept that Torchwood would allow anyone, but especially Rose, to interface with quasi-nuclear technology.

"And you went through that? Inertial fisson-powered particle engines, and they just _let you _walk right into it?" He doesn't want to get shouty; he can already feel it building up. It's anxiety, not a little, and sometimes it makes his voice volume ramp up higher than he means. It's been a difficult morning, dealing with a new circadian clock and hormones and inferior inner ear mechanisms that are still providing him with mild swoops of possibly hangover-related vertigo. Dealing with visible potentiality condensates and a missing time-sense and Rose shifting from hot to cold so quickly if he hadn't been dizzy enough already he'd be spinning. How quickly he's forgotten that it wasn't five minutes before that he'd genuinely feared he was near death.

"Sweetheart," Jackie says, knotting her hands. She's pale, a little shine to her forehead that wasn't there before. She's not feeling her best either.

"You went through it too, Jackie, they let you go." He doesn't bring up Mickey, gone to them once more. The emotions are high enough as it is, he's learned that much, but it doesn't stop the diatribe that's collecting behind his teeth. The outrage boiling in his gut.

"Why would that be important just now?" Rose's got her arms folded, right over her chest, and he kind of wants to shake her. His palms itch and yes, he wants to touch her but refrains. Same old game, new rules.

"Particle engines, I should have known they'd have that kind of technology pocketed away. Bloody Torchwood. It's how they opened the void, after all, isn't it? Particle engines fired at the weak spot. Built a tower to reach the spatial disturbance and-"

"Doctor," she reaches, her palm on his bare bicep, fingers curling. On impulse, he tugs it away.

Because his mind is back in the void room at Canary Wharf. He's still resting his palm against a white wall in some kind of moment of grieving, clinging to a lingering presence that maybe he'd invented in his mind. Because, to the Doctor, it always had taken a few moments when Rose left a room before all of her was gone. Maybe perhaps he'd always regarded her that way, as having a kind of halo around her, the way things do when they are borrowed and fleeting and too-good-to-be-kept. That halo, it went out of the void room like a shadow passing in front of the sun. Like something draining away, just leaving an old emptiness behind.

He'd tried to send her away because it was the noble thing, the altruistic thing, and she'd calmly looked back while he'd snarled at her, practically spitting, trying to pry open her eyes so she could see what she was choosing to lose forever. What he was trying to give her. Because once someone had told him love was selfless, even though only now did he really understand that the impulses that go with it are _not_.

It was the choice he hadn't been able to make, that last day of the war. As though making that choice for Rose Tyler, saving her from losing everyone important to her would somehow balance something out.

(_And that's how you live with yourself_.)

She'd looked at him then the same way she was looking at him now, calm in the face of a brewing storm. He remembers, it was that moment that he'd first understood. Really understood. His whole body had gone silent. Turned to stone, very still and silent, the eye of a hurricane.

He'd might as well have gotten kicked in the gut. Because it wasn't that he hadn't known it.

That she loved him. That he loved her. It hung in the air between them every day, ignored and forgotten like the smoke of an old war, and they'd squinted through it, pretending not to see.

And he'd wanted it. Wanted it, wanted it, oh please, _please_, wanted it so much it physically, properly hurt. Less a sledgehammer to the chest and more a creeping ache, an insistent throbbing like an overworked muscle. Like something growing inside him; a weed, gradually strangling him, tighter and tighter every day until he couldn't breathe.

It had evoked an anger response at the time, staring it all head on. Because he's the one that runs away.

It wasn't ten minutes later that she was gone, and the only howling void that remained was the one reopened inside him. And he hadn't cried. Not until later.

"_Doctor_," Rose says again, her voice low, a deep line between her pushed-together eyebrows. The way she vacillates between dispassion and concern is dizzying, but even still, the way she looks at him, all he can remember is how she said he felt like a stranger. Now, she's talking to him like he's one. Or a child. Something unstable and dangerous, blood and anger and revenge. And maybe she's right, but not for the reason she thinks. "You don't seem well."

"I'm fine," he tells her, and turns, keeping his eyes anywhere but on her face. Because looking at her makes him feel helpless and empty and increasingly punished the way maybe the Other had wanted after all. Any moment of empathy he'd spared for him over the last day, he wants to take back and spend them thinking of something, someone-anyone-else. He doesn't have that time to spare anymore, after all. But he's not beaten. This time that's left to him, it's _his_, even if she doesn't want to share it with him. Even if she's decided against him. And how all this feels he doesn't have a decent word to describe. Eight-billion languages and nothing even comes to mind.

What's important is they need to get to the control base at Torchwood. He wants to see that dimension cannon with its inertial-fission engine and reactor shell and its likely multi-million joule discharge spike. What's important is, he thinks he knows exactly how it works; what it does. Because maybe this isn't _just _about time asynchronicity.

(Maybe none of this is what she wants.)

The Doctor swallows tightly, extending a hand to take the communicator from Rose, roiling with formless animosity, head gripped in the slowly inflating pain, choking, feeling strangled by that creeping ache that's still inside him even now, his skin feeling raw and new and everything a little on fire.

"Really. _Honestly_," he lies. "Fine."


End file.
